How do we enter a February 29 birth date?
The person's DOL record shows February 29, but JIS will not accept the date.
JIS does accept a February 29 birth date if the YEAR entered with the month and day was, in fact, a leap year. JIS dates go by actual calendars, so if there was a February 29th that year, the system should accept the date when entered.
The problem arises with the DOL license Expiration Date. DOL's dates are NOT calendar driven, so when a person's date of birth is February 29, the DOL record will show a license Expiration Date of February 29, X number of years after the issuance date, EVEN if that year was not a valid leap year.
When you press <F6> from the DOL screen to bring the DOL information back into JIS, both the person's license number AND the license Expiration Date are added to the Person Information record (PER screen) in JIS. When the transferred Expiration Date shows February 29 together with a year that was an invalid leap year, pressing <ENTER> returns a FATAL Error Message in JIS. The message advises that the Expiration Date on the license is not valid.
The suggested way to get around this problem in the future would be to change the license Expiration Date to March 1 for the same year that the license is due to expire according to DOL's records. That way you can still have an Expiration Date entered. (March 1 is used rather than February 28 so you will not show the license expiring early.)
For your reference, below is a list of valid leap year dates from 1892 through 2012. (Note: You probably will not see many person records with birth dates of 1900, but in case you are thinking the table is incorrect, 1900 was NOT a leap year.)
RN id: 1857