The Fourth Circuit ruled on August 5, 2026 that employers cannot deny a disability reassignment request just because a worker cannot perform their original job’s essential functions, reversing a lower court’s summary judgment for pest control company Orkin in Dieng v. Orkin, LLC.
Ibrahima Dieng, a pest control technician, injured his knee and was medically cleared only for less physically demanding work. He repeatedly asked Orkin to reassign him to an open customer service or sales role. Managers said no such positions existed and placed him on unpaid leave for sixteen months before he resigned. The district court sided with Orkin, reasoning Dieng could not perform his original job’s essential functions, so no accommodation was owed. The appeals court disagreed, holding the ADA requires a separate analysis of whether he could perform a different, available position’s functions, and that the sixteen month unpaid leave amounted to what the court called professional purgatory.
For HR and benefits leaders, the ruling narrows a defense many accommodation programs lean on: treating “can’t do the old job” as the end of the analysis. Failing to document engagement with reassignment requests now reads to a court as a broken interactive process. It lands in a year when federal discrimination enforcement is already in flux, with the EEOC moving to scrap its own EEO-1 demographic reporting requirement even as it keeps pursuing individual cases, including a recent pregnancy discrimination settlement built on the same kind of undocumented process.
The original insight for HR technology buyers is procedural: leave and accommodation tracking systems need to timestamp every reassignment request and response, because this case turned on Orkin’s inability to show it had searched, not on whether a role existed. A system that logs a leave clock but not the interactive dialogue leaves employers exposed the same way Orkin was.
