You left out a very important word in this explanation…“potentially.” He could have *potentially *been able to collect far more money by suing them…and potentially could have ended up with a jury awarding him nothing or next to nothing. That’s the whole point of work-comp systems - the worker gets defined benefits without having to go through a jury trial and potentially get nothing. (Disclaimer - I’m a California work-comp legal secretary, so I don’t know the particulars of any other state or country’s system.)
If he sues now, if the suit isn’t barred by the statute of limitations after all this time, he could potentially be awarded a lot of money…and potentially end up with nothing, in the hole in fact due to the expenses of litigation. Depositions, expert witnesses, filing fees, all add up, and if no lawyer wants to take your case there’s probably a good reason for that.
The biggest problem is that no lawyers want to deal with them in particular. Apparently it has something to do with legislative law and the fact that WCB is not really considered an entity. They are protected under law from any type of litigation. I believe that you cannot sue the Board itself or any of it’s employees. Now don’t quote me on that, I am not entirely sure of what I just said, I’m kind of paraphrasing what one lawyer told me quite awhile ago. It may just mean that it’s not impossible, just very difficult.
It would be nice if any of the Canadian legal types could weigh in on that, if for clarification if nothing else.
I just want to add that I had earlier mentioned that one of the biggest issues was time and money, just because they are very difficult to deal with. I’m pretty sure that most of the cost goes towards the lawyers time, not experts or depositions. I could be wrong though.
IANAL, but even if the facts are 100% as FJLuvly states, he has no standing to gain anything in this potential lawsuit. He was given WCB benefits as if he was fully covered at the time of the accident. THAT was his remedy. He cannot claim he was harmed by lack of WCB coverage, then accept WCB coverage retroactively, then sue to be stripped of the coverage so that he can sue them… for not providing WCB coverage.
No, if the facts are 100% as you say, it would be WCB who had a cause of action against the corporation for defrauding them. After all, it is they who will pay out $810k to an employee who was not covered.
That being said, it’s quite possible, even probable, that instead of defrauding WCB to provide retroactive coverage, the corporation either DID provide coverage (and it took them several months to prove their case to WCB*) OR they openly admitted their error to WCB, and worked with them to provide retroactive coverage, which may have included retroactive premiums + penalty/interest.
*I worked as a payroll clerk for several years and worked directly with the Ohio BWC. They routinely sent me notices that I’d underpaid my premium, along with penalty/interest charges. And they were ALWAYS wrong. (Usually it involved a clerk keying in the wrong SSN.) Sometimes it took me months to get them to admit error and remove the penalty.
In a sense you are right, but, the thing is I had no choice but to accept the retroactive payments. at that point a had went 3 months with no income at all, and was still under the impression that I was going top return to work soon. I had continued to live as I normally did and wound up with a lot of credit card debt, as I said I thought I was going back to work. The other part is that before I accepted the money from them my lawyer had tried to start litigation and it was well over a month later that we realized that we were getting nowhere, simply because they continued to stall and would not provide the info we requested. The next thing that happened was that my case manager told me that I had better hurry up and decide what I was going to do because the money was snot going to be there forever. What choice did I have? I was racking up a few thousand dollars a month in credit card debt just to pay my mortgage, heat, lights, food and all the other normal expenses, remember I went 3 months with no income at all. This was where all my money problems started.
Who do you believe “stole” your life? i.e. who is responsible for the damages you’ve incurred. I thought at first it was your former employer, but post #102 makes is sound like your grievance is with the WCB, which frankly I don’t see.
What payment or recompense do you believe you are entitled to? And what circumstances exist in your case that makes you believe you are entitled to more than anyone else who became 75% permanently disabled from a workplace injury? Are you arguing that EVERYONE with your injury should get more, or just you for some reason?
LTD payments by necessity must be a fraction of an employees actual earning potential or else there would undoubtedly be a rash of individuals injuring themselves on purpose in order to be able to collect a full paycheck for the rest of their lives without ever having to work again. I am NOT saying that you fall into this category, BTW, or that it is anything other that spectacularly stupid thing to do, only that I believe it would happen if disability payments were more on par with actual lost income.
Correct, but not having coverage means you accept liability. I wish I could find the letter with the question that the second lawyer asked, my first lawyer has it because he used it on his second attempt to get answers. It alluded yo the fact that if they did not have coverage it would be up to me to decide how to proceed, that I had to sign off to accept responsibility. The only paper I have ever signed was for access to medical records, I have outright refused to sign anything else including the accident report filed by my employer two months after the accident.
This means nothing to me. The fact is they had no coverage at the time of the accident and they obtained coverage through fraudulent measures. You seem to miss the point that I am continually trying to make and that is by law I would have had every right to start litigation against my employer.
Say someone hits me through no fault of my own. The driver who hit me has an expired insurance policy. Which scares the hell out of me because my car is totaled and I have significant medical expenses–none of which I can pay for.
But before I can get my act together to sue the driver for damages, he somehow manages to get his insurance straight. Through some magical savviness on his part, I’m fully compensated before the end of the month. I don’t end up having to pay for anything, just as if he’d been insured all along. I’m even reimbursed for the travel costs I incurred for the weeks I didn’t have a car.
I guess I can see how it’s unfair the guy was never penalized (AFAIK) for not having insurance. But that penalty isn’t owed to me. It’s owed to the state. So that’s really none of my business.
And I guess I could have been rewarded more damages if the insurer hadn’t stepped in to save the day. But it’s also possible I would have gotten less. A jury may decide that I’m was partly to blame for that accident (there’s a witness who will testify she saw me fiddling with the sun visor seconds before the accident.) The witness may be a goddamn liar, but I wouldn’t be able to disprove her. So really, I’m probably better off with how things worked out. A person could drive themselves nuts with woulda, coulda, shoulda.
So my conclusion is that you should let this go, JFLuvly.
Rosa Parks, MLK, and Gandhi didn’t give up in their fights, but they also weren’t fighting alone. They also weren’t fighting personal battles, but rather something a whole lot larger than themselves. But apart from these obvious nitpicks, Rosa Parks, MLK, and Gandhi likely wouldn’t have taken the “dirty” WCB money in the first place. Even if you and your kids would have been kicked out on the street, dirty money is dirty money. You made the choice to take it and by doing so, you agreed to other things.
The op was looking to see if he could get a bunch of skeptical people to buy his version of reality.
The answer is he didn’t.
A skeptical jury may find him to be fraudulent and demand retribution of what he has been paid in the past. My gut reaction would be to react in that direction, honestly, just based on the manner of the presentation. Just sayin’ for the little it is worth. IANAL. (Or Canadian.)
Agreed, that’s why your scenario is meaningless to me. It’s not what happened.
I disagree that they were not fighting personal battles, they just affected a lot more people, people who otherwise felt the same but had no voice. This really is not all that different from my plight and once again I am not comparing myself to them. The thing is, I, like most people, had no idea how this system worked. You really can’t appreciate it until you are involved in it. The amount of people affected by denied WCB and LTD claims, and I mean legitimate claims, who are left with nothing is way bigger than you would imagine. The suicide rate, from what I can tell, is pretty high. I have read many stories over the years, from all across Canada, and to be honest, it’s nothing short of disgusting the way injured workers are treated.
Your last remark is a bit of a cheap shot. I took the money because I was flat broke and had a family to take care of. When they told me to hurry up and make my decision because the money was not going to be there forever, I took it as a threat that if I didn’t take it then, I may very well end up with nothing. Please keep in mind that I was under a great deal of stress and was still trying to cope with the effects of the accident. I accepted the money under great duress. I have never really stopped trying to fix this, I just had to stop on occasion to try and get my bearings. I have been doing this, essentially by myself, for eight years now. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor, I’m just a regular guy. I’ve said it before, win lose or draw, I have to try to fix it so I can say I’ve done everything I could.
This is pretty much my take on it. The OP seems to believe he’s still entitled to profit from the employer’s (alleged) negligence, but it’s difficult to understand why any penalty they would theoretically owe would be awarded to him. He’s gotten what he would’ve gotten if there had been no negligence, and what anyone else in his situation would get. That he doesn’t feel it’s enough is unfortunate, but also irrelevant.
If I slip and fall at a grocery store and break my leg, and it turns out the store doesn’t have the right kind of liability insurance—but my doctor bills get paid anyway, because the company just writes a check—the end result is the same, so why would I be entitled to some huge additional payout?
Are you saying find me fraudulent? On what grounds? Do you think I am insane? Do you think I would put this out there and make this shit up? I really hope you stick around and answer me, cause that’s just nuts. In fact, in the last eight years, that’s one of the craziest things I have heard so far. I would also like to know what you mean by “the manner of presentation”?
So 6-8 weeks later you go back to your normal life and all is well. Yep, no problem. Same accident, you bang your head on the floor. You can never go back to work again,you can no longer concentrate on anything, your memory is shot, you lose all your possessions, but hey your doctor bill is paid so what the hell, I’ll just carry on like nothing happened. It makes no difference that you struggle to feed your family, or that you go to bed wondering if you are going to be homeless the next day. No offence, but I’m going to have to call bullshit on that. I think I would be hard pressed to believe that most of you would accept that
Could we please try to get away from the “ifs”, they are really of no significance to this discussion. I’ve already said a few times that if it had of been above board there would be nothing I could do. I accept that. The thing is that is not what happened.
I’m not missing any point. I know exactly what you’re saying. You want continue to accept the very lucrative benefits of being covered by WCB, but also want that same coverage declared invalid so that you can sue your former employer for lost wages. And I’m saying that you cannot have it both ways. Either return all the money you’ve gotten (and will continue to receive) from WCB because you weren’t covered at the time of your accident (which will free you to sue the corporation for whatever beef you have against them), OR keep the money and accept that you’ve maxed out your benefits.
It’s ironic that you don’t want to deal in “ifs” when that is the entire crux of your argument. IF they’d hadn’t successfully reinstated your coverage retroactively, you COULD have sued them. Can you not see how ridiculous that position is?
I doubt you can prove that it was not above board. Once again, for all you know, WCB worked with the corporation to remedy their oversight. Believe it or not, honest mistakes happen all the time, and not every one of them is corrected via fraudulent means.
Even if it wasn’t above board, there was NO HARM TO YOU because you were ultimately treated as if you were a fully covered member. Whatever harm that was caused by you was remedied when they reinstated your coverage retroactive to your accident.
Once again, even if the corporation did defraud WCB, it is WCB who would have the cause of action (and monetary award) against the corporation, NOT YOU. Any penalties would go to WCB to reimburse them for money that they have paid (and will continue to pay) to you, an ineligible claimant.
I know you don’t mean he should literally give all the money back, but it really goes beyond even that, were it possible. As JFLuvly himself said, he only accepted the WC payments initially because they had no income for 3 months and was hoping he’d be able to return to work soon. Well that’s a shitty situation and a reasonable course of action but it’s also a huge ‘point’ behind worker’s comp. Getting the payments fast without spending years in court with no income is reaping the benefit of their retroactive policy. So even giving every penny back (with interest) wouldn’t be ‘fair’ payback to the benefits he’s enjoyed from wc, because when he needed it (nearly immediately), it was there.
I understand you don’t like hypotheticals but you don’t seem to be grasping what people mean when they use the word ‘if’ in your case. If you cut through it, they’re saying you weren’t wronged. You got what you deserved which is what everyone else gets too. And by “what you deserve” I mean the exact same outcome as anyone else. The “if” language is just trying to make you see that although the situation sucks, it’s as good as anyone else’s would be in your shoes.
I mean your version of what you are due and why. As presented by you without hearing events form the other side or a neutral party.
I am saying that you come off as trying to game things to get more out of it than others would typically get. I read a story of someone who kept spending on a credit card when nothing was coming in and feels vitimized by that. I see a court case in which the other side will hire experts, hired gun experts. The story they will paint is that your “disability” is not consistent with the injury you had, that “every test result came back normal”, that your doctors have stopped calling it a brain injury. It really is not clear what your injury is … PTSD? But it is clear that a good lawyer could make it sound like malingering and that you could pretty easily be made to sound like someone trying to con the system to get more than others would in similar circumstances, more than what is thought of as “fair” for most, or even blaming an injury for an underlieing psychiatric problem that was at most brought to the surface by an injury. Please note: I am saying that such is the case. I am saying that such is the way your story comes off and that is without an opposing side’s spin.
You wanted honest reactions. That’s how I responded reading your posts. Without hearing the facts of the case from any other POV let alone presented by skillful lawyers and hired experts.
If there were negligence on the part of the store that caused me to fall and injure myself, of course I could try to sue for damages, pain & suffering, whatever. You don’t appear to be claiming that your accident was caused by employer negligence, but rather that they should pay you more money simply because you need more money, and because the money you are getting didn’t come through the proper channels.