Today’s guest post comes to us from my colleague Tom Domer of Wisconsin. I read this headline in the Insurance Journal while ago. My assumption, even though I represent injured workers’, was that the headline concerned an employee who had defrauded an insurance company. Why did I immediately jump to that conclusion? Because most of [...]
My good friend and colleague Jon Gelman posted this recent piece of news on his blog the other week: A New Hampshire insurance group has been charged by the State with improperly appropriating millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds to a workers’ compensation insurance plan. The improper allocation is described in a petition filed by [...]
As you have seen me mention several times on this blog, the failure of many employers to play by the rules continues to plague the nation’s workers'’ compensation system. In one type of fraud, known as misclassification, employers incorrectly designate workers' as outside consultants or independent contractors. When workers' are misclassified, insurance companies do not [...]
When we hear about workplace fraud, most of us think of a worker faking an injury to receive benefits that he or she does not deserve. While that kind of fraud does exist, it is minor compared to the big money lost to fraud from companies. The big money lost to fraud comes from companies, [...]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzT6ZGp3eKQ] Last September I invited Dan Reilly from the Teamsters to give a continuing legal education talk at the annual conference of the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group. Dan presented on the topic of employer fraud, and in particular on an increasingly common practice known as misclassification. The video above is just a [...]
In the previous post on this topic, I outlined the problem of employer fraud (as opposed to employee fraud) in the workers’ compensation system. In this post, I will examine some real life examples of employer fraud and discuss what is being done to combat this problem. First, let’s consider a few real-time examples of [...]
Perception is reality until proven otherwise, and when it comes to fraud in the workers’’ compensation system there is the perception that employee fraud is widespread and costs are up because of employee fraud. In 2005 there was $446,826.00 in employee fraud, but $12 million dollars in fraud by employers. Could that perception be wrong? For example, [...]