Veterans Day as an American Samoa Government Holiday

This is a small entry about a real inconsistency in American Samoa law, recorded because a government employee reading the personnel rules would get the wrong date. Code section 1.0501 lists the public holidays in American Samoa, and item (9) is "11 November, Veterans Day." The list also carries 17 April, American Samoa Flag Day, and 16 July, Manu'a Islands Cession Day, which were added in 1983. The American Samoa Administrative Code holiday list in the personnel rules, in the hours, leaves and absences chapter of title 4, runs differently. Its item (9) is "Veteran's Day, 4th Monday in October," and item (8) is Columbus Day on the second Monday in October. That list came in with Rule 10-81, effective 29 July 1981. The October date is a fossil. The federal Uniform Monday Holiday Act moved Veterans Day to the fourth Monday in October starting in 1971; Public Law 94-97, signed in 1975, moved it back to November 11 effective in 1978. American Samoa's 1981 personnel rule copied the version that had already been repealed three years earlier, and nothing has amended it since. Practice follows the statute, not the rule. The Governor's office issues an annual holiday memorandum, and General Memorandum 256-25, issued 6 November 2025, announced the Veterans Day 2025 holiday. The administrative code list also provides that other holidays may be established by Governor's proclamation, which is the mechanism doing the work. So a veteran employed by the American Samoa Government gets November 11 off, like everyone else in the territory, and the conflicting rule is dormant rather than operative. If a personnel office ever cites the October date, Code 1.0501 is the later and higher authority and the annual memorandum is the evidence of practice.