Toni Schiavo was thinking of taking a trip to Las Vegas to see her parents. Suzi Moczygemba had planned to use her time off for an extended Thanksgiving visit with her daughter in Boston. Instead, both women will be at their desks. They are donat­ing their accrued vacation time to help victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Their employer, Health Net Inc., is one of a growing number of businesses that have launched vacation-donation programs in recent weeks. The arrangements -- a new twist on leave-sharing programs that allow employees to donate time to colleagues burdened by illness or tragedy allow workers to forgo va­cation days and have their employers give the money to charity. "Everybody was just so profoundly affected by this that I felt the need to do some­thing important and significant,'' said Schiavo, a privacy specialist for the Woodland Hills, Calif.-based company who is donating a week of vacation time. "But I don't have enough cash set aside to do something like that." Such donations could get a boost from a decision last week by the IRS not to count such donated vacation pay as taxable income. 

At Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine, employee donations of vacation time translated into $76,047 for Red Cross and United Way attack relief funds. Employees of Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente donated vacation time worth about $400,000. "I haven't been here very long and I don't have a lot of time accrued and usually I guard mine very closely," said Gail Florian, a payroll depart­ment employee at the health maintenance organization's Portland, Ore., office who estimates her two-day donation will be worth $322. "But this seemed like a good reason to give it out." County government employees in Alameda County, Calif., are also donating vacation time. Schiavo acknowledged she would like the vacation time. But, and I think this is going to sound hokey, I'm thinking I'm going to be a proud American going to work on a day I'm supposed to be off and knowing that I'm doing something," she said.