Within the past three months, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has secured nearly $9 million from companies that have committed violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by discriminating against and firing employees with disabilities who requested medical leave or exhausted their allotted medical leave to address those disabilities.

For example, on June 17, 2016, the EEOC announced that three integrated Nevada-based car dealerships will pay $50,000 for firing an employee with multiple sclerosis who requested medical leave for the diagnosis and treatment of her disability. According to the EEOC, about three months after Shara Rynearson was hired as a commissioned salesperson, she notified her supervisor of certain symptoms — including sudden vision changes, facial numbness and balance loss — that caused her to go to the emergency room in October 2010. Later, she showed her employer her hospital discharge papers, which included a diagnosis predicting multiple sclerosis. She also advised her employer that she could not work until after a medical appointment scheduled for early November to confirm the diagnosis. Instead of allowing Rynearson to take medical leave for the diagnosis and treatment of her disability, the company allegedly fired her on November 5, 2010.

In a different case, on May 13, 2016, the EEOC entered into an agreement with a home-improvement, appliance and hardware giant to pay $8.6 million for the firing three employees with disabilities and failing to provide reasonable accommodations to them when their medical leaves of absence exceeded the company’s 180-day (and subsequent 240-day) maximum leave policy between 2007 and 2010. The EEOC argued that the company’s automatic termination of employees who exceeded an arbitrary time limit on medical leaves of absence was unreasonable and a violation of the ADA. In fact, federal courts have consistently held that requests for extended leave can be a reasonable accommodation for a disability under the ADA, depending on the circumstances, and that automatic termination policies whereby an employer denies a request for such leave based on the employee having already been out a certain amount of time are unlawful.