Henry Ford once said “chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.” I’m here to tell you now’s the time to evaluate your pre-loss and post loss workers compensation strategies and it will warm you even more.
The standing committees in both the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate have recently approved the 2015-2016 Workers Compensation Advisory Council agreed-bill. With the 23 provisions contained in the agreed-bill, employers should be prepared to maximize the impact of those changes to better control their workers compensation costs. Here’s a brief summary of those items. And here is a complete list summary of the changes.
- Statute of Limitations: The statute of limitations, the time that an injured worker has to come back after an employer for an alleged work related injury, will move from 12 years (longest in the country) to 6 years, but only for traumatic injuries. Occupational/repetitive type injuries, those that take place over time, will still have a 12 year statute of limitation.
- Strategy: It will be even more important for you as an employer to fully investigate alleged injuries and document relevant facts. A strong accident investigation process, along with the use of a body-diagram tool, will go a long way towards defending those cases that move from an allegation that the injury was traumatic to now it’s an occupation injury simply to double the statute of limitations. Now is the time to evaluate your accident investigation process and tools.
- Permanent Partial Disability Rates to Increase: The rates used to determine permanent partial (PPD) disability will increase by over 5.5% over each of the next two years. That may not seem like a big number, but it’s estimated that these PPD increases alone will have an impact on your worker’s compensation rates over the next two years.
- Strategy: It’s time to take a fresh look at your pre-loss strategies. What are you doing to prevent serious injuries from taking place in your operation? Have you gotten complacent? When is the last time you had someone come through to perform an evaluation of your processes and procedures? Now is the time to evaluate your pre-loss strategies.
- Apportionment of Permanent Partial Disability: Physicians who prepare a report on permanent disability will now be allowed to differentiate between the issues of permanent disability caused by the direct result of a work related injury versus disability that was pre-existing. In other words, if you have an employee with a pre-existing disability and they get an additional disability as a result of the work injury, you should only be responsible for the disability caused by your work related injury.
- Strategy: It may be time to re-evaluate the concept of requiring a post-offer physical. Documentation of existing permanent disabilities or physical impairments may have an impact on the cost of future worker’s compensation claims. Now is the time to complete a cost-benefit analysis on a implementing a post-offer physical.
- Termination for Misconduct: Once an employee is released to light duty and they are suspended or terminated due to misconduct, temporary disability can now be denied.
- Strategy: It’s time to take a look at your human resource policies & procedures to be sure that you have an appropriate disciplinary process documented and that you are following it consistently. Expect a lot of litigation regarding this provision. When’s the last time you blew the dust off that employee handbook to be sure it’s up-to-snuff?
- Liability for Injuries Related to Drugs & Alcohol: In theory, this provision will bar recovery of indemnity benefits when an employee violates your drug and/or alcohol policy and where there is a direct causation between violation of the policy and the workplace injury. In reality, there are applicant attorneys who are already covering the circuit stating that there is a flaw with this provision and it will not do what it was intended to do. Snookered again, but time will tell.
- Strategy: When is the last time you evaluated your drug and alcohol policy? Do you have a drug and alcohol policy? Is it documented and consistently followed? Now is the time either to implement a policy if you don’t have one or re-evaluate what you have in place.
As an employer, you now have the benefit of some employer-friendly changes in the Wisconsin Workers Compensation Act. If you are looking at optimizing the potential impact on your organization, contact me for additional information. Let me help you evaluate whether or not you are positioned to take advantage of these changes.
