Great answer as usual. One nitpick: As you write that this depends on region & culture, could you add the region & culture of the companies you worked? Office jobs in the USA, I presume?

Also, I guess this "inofficial" approach really only works with salaried employees? Hourly employees cannot just "disappear" and still get paid, the would need to falsify timesheets, which would probably be a crime.

@sleske It's potentially a crime for salaried employees too, if they're taking leave and not filling it in.

@sleske I guess hourly paid employees would have been paid for the weekend overtime Joe mentioned instead of being expected to do it for free with MAYBE some compensation. Arguably it isn’t time off anyway, just a change in schedule.

@GeoffreyBrent - It's not a crime to not go to work if you're salaried and your boss told you not to... Your work duties for that day just so happen to be stay at home

This is a good answer in a US context or anywhere else where employees do not have a work contract that specifies the number of hours worked. In most European jurisdictions employees are legally required to have a work contract that specifies the number of hours worked. In such a setting doing this would be fraud, see other answers.

@JoeStrazzere I usually agree wholeheartedly with most of your answers but not this one. I have not downvoted but if you did this in my company in the UK you would almost certainly be fired and as it is fraudulently claiming earnings it would probably be reportable to the Financial Conduct Authority if the company was financial services.

What happens when the employee that is unofficially on vacation has an accident while nominally on clock? This seems an insurance hazard, but nothing I ever had to worry about in the US so I don't know.

I agree with this answer wholeheartedly, as this has been my experience working a career as a salaried employee in the US. However, I'm concerned that it may not fit well with the OPs employer's company culture, considering the cryptic and byzantine PTO rules that are employed there.

While I agree with this answer in general, it feels like a company with crazy PTO rules like the OP's would not have upper management conducive to this informal process.

Even as a salaried employee in the US this would be problematic if timesheet data is used to control what the employee's labor costs are billed to. External customers are the biggest risk here because time off is billed against overhead not to the customer's contract; although depending on how internal accounting works it could also be a problem for some companies.

The US Govt is especially picky on this front, at a prior job management had to send out reminders that if you spent an hour doing internal training one day but made the time up by still doing a full 8 hours of billable work you couldn't "donate" the hour to the company and only put 8 hours of customer work on your time sheet. In many cases because you only worked 8/9ths of the day for the govt, the company was only allowed to bill 8/9ths of your cost for the day to the customer and the govt viewed it the same as any other form of time sheet fraud.

@DanIsFiddlingByFirelight: For a salaried exempt employee in the US, there is no timesheet (at least at most companies), because there is no legal obligation to track that information. If there is "billing" involved, that is an exception, because then you have a client who is paying for those billable hours, and you need to know how much to charge them. But if you're e.g. a software engineer working for a tech company, nobody tracks hours and nobody (legally) cares when you specifically work as long as your job gets done. There may still be policies etc., but the government is not involved.

Assuming this is software related. Just to add to the answer. Basically yes this is pretty common / universal on a "day or two" basis. (I've never seen it applied on the scale of "so you can take two weeks off in March".) Every team I've been in or led, the team lead can and does say things like "person X, feel free to take friday and monday off since you _ _ worked 90 hours last week, etc _ _", or "everyone forget about Monday, see you Tuesday." And the lead does that with no reference to any one else in the company. However, this is more in the hurly burly world of startups.

@OldNick I can't comment on the legalities, but in every company I've worked (all UK, combination of large, small, established and start-up, and including financial services), it's been perfectly normal that managers are reasonable about ad-hoc time off, especially where it's effectively 'time off in lieu'. I'm talking about small things like finishing early on a Friday, taking Monday off after a busy on-call weekend, not whole extra weeks off or anything, but these sorts of informal one-offs are perfectly normal in my experience.