When an employee gets hurt at their workstation during their shift, nobody wonders whether it is a workers’ compensation matter. The harder questions come from everything that happens around the edges of the workday. The employee who twists an ankle in the parking lot. The salesperson rear-ended on the way to a client. The warehouse […]

Most employers picture a workers’ compensation claim as a single event. Someone slips on a wet floor, a hand gets caught in a machine, a box falls off a shelf. There is a date, a witness, and usually an incident report filled out the same day. Those are traumatic injury claims, and they are the

Nonprofit organizations run on a mix of paid staff, part-time workers, board members, and volunteers, often with the lines between those groups blurred. A volunteer coordinator may be paid for twenty hours and donate another ten. A board member may also run the annual fundraiser. Community members may show up to help at an event

A workers’ compensation policy can lapse for reasons that have nothing to do with a decision to go without coverage. A payment is missed during a cash crunch. A renewal notice goes to an old email address. A carrier non-renews and the replacement policy starts a week late. A payroll report fails to transmit on

For a lot of small business owners, the hardest part of workers’ compensation is not the coverage itself but the way it is paid for. A traditional policy asks you to estimate a full year of payroll up front, pay a large deposit, make installment payments based on that guess, and then settle up at

Most employers know that fewer claims mean lower workers’ compensation costs over time. Fewer know that many states and carriers offer premium credits that reward employers for having specific safety and workplace programs in place, before any claim reduction shows up in the experience rating. These credits are not automatic. They usually require an application,

Small businesses are often built on informal help. A spouse who handles the books, a teenager who works the counter after school, a retired parent who fills in on busy days, a friend’s kid who works summers. These arrangements feel casual, and owners frequently assume workers’ compensation rules do not apply to them. In most

Every year, a few months before your workers’ compensation policy renews, your carrier or agent can produce a document called a loss run. It is a claim-by-claim history of your policy: what was reported, what was paid, what is still reserved, and what is closed. Most business owners glance at the total and move on.

Most workers’ comp conversations revolve around sprains, strains, and medical-only claims — the routine injuries that make up the bulk of any loss run. But the claims that define a workers’ comp program are the rare, severe ones: a fatality, a traumatic brain injury, a spinal cord injury, severe burns, an amputation. These catastrophic claims

Workers’ comp fraud makes headlines when an employee filmed water-skiing collects disability checks — but employee claim fraud is only one corner of the problem, and not the biggest one. Fraud in the comp system runs three directions: employees exaggerating or inventing claims, employers underreporting payroll or misclassifying workers to dodge premium, and providers billing