The owner of a Redwood City roofing company will spend at least eight months in jail as punishment for his scheme to avoid taxes and workers’ compensation premiums by paying his employees a portion of their wages in cash. Last month, a Superior Court judge sentenced Laurence Bennett Guy, owner of Guy’s Roofing, to a …
LOS ANGELES – The Industrial Medical Council last month produced a rough draft of guidelines to help state disability raters evaluate injured workers who suffer from urinary incontinence. Current state rules provide a disability rating only for patients who have complete loss of both urinary and bowel functions. That forces state officials to play it …
Torres vs. Parkhouse Tire Service, Inc. (Filed 8/30/2001) See Sept. 21 edition of ABR This case provides an interesting twist on the “Exclusive Remedy Rule.” Under Labor Code 3600, an employer is liable for injuries to his employees arising out of and in the course of employment. This liability is “in lieu of any other …
California’s workers’ compensation system had the highest claims adjusting and litigation expenses among eight large states studied, according to an August research brief by the Workers Compensation Research Institute in Massachusetts. Such benefit delivery costs have been growing rapidly in California, which also has a higher percentage of cases where permanent partial disability payments are …
Senate Bill 71 contains dozens of obscure provisions that had experts nitpicking public policy or simply scratching their heads. For example, language buried in the 107-page bill called for the Industrial Medical Council to collect “utilization review” and “outcomes” data, basically directing the panel of doctors to review what types of treatments seem to work …
As poster children go, Gary Vincelet is rather old and not nearly as heartrending on videotape as he made himself out to be in court. A Shasta County jury deadlocked when asked to convict Vincelet of workers’ compensation fraud, despite a videotape by investigators that showed him vigorously wiping windows, vacuuming drapes and lugging buckets …
A Sacramento woman faces a five-year prison term and up to $50,000 in fines for allegedly exaggerating her pain after filing a workers’ comp claim. Investigators with the California Department of Insurance’s Fraud Division have charged Debra Rodriguez, 48, with four felony counts of insurance fraud. She was arrested Aug. 22 and booked into Sacramento …
SACRAMENTO – Insurance Commissioner Harry Low failed to persuade the Legislature to impose more control over workers’ compensation rates, but he plans to start fresh after lawmakers return to the Capitol next year. Low outlined a plan to restore solvency to workers’ comp carriers in an Aug. 2 memorandum to Gov. Gray Davis. He asked …