As a business owner, you cannot afford to waste money. One area you might not have considered as a possible source of waste is paying too much in workers’ compensation insurance contributions.
While you need to have coverage, you don’t want to be paying more than you should, and if you have employees submitting fraudulent claims, an insurer may start to charge you more. Workers’ comp fraud is surprisingly common. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, workers’ comp fraud costs companies around $30 billion each year.
How can you spot it?
Here are a few precautions to consider:
- Get different people to ask an injured employee what happened: If a story is not entirely true, the person telling it might find it difficult to keep the details consistent each time they recount it. An employee might get suspicious if you ask them repeatedly, but you can use other managers and so forth to check out for variations that could suggest the story is not wholly based on fact.
- Check if anyone else saw what happened: It’s unlikely that an employee was entirely alone at the time that they sustained an acute, accident-related injury. There’s a good chance that another worker will have seen something.
- See if your cameras caught what happened: Many workplaces have significant camera coverage that can provide hard-to-dispute evidence in the event of a fraudulent accident claim.
- Get another medical opinion: Not all doctors will have the same view of an injury and its consequences. There’s no harm in getting a second or third opinion.
If you do suspect that a claim is fraudulent, seek legal help to understand your options.
