We thought we were perfect but we were wrong.
Editor’s comment: As part of our KC&A Update of last week, we advised our readers the State of Illinois, County of Cook and City of Chicago did not implement surveillance of their workforce. We feel this concept is crucial to insuring the governmental bodies are paying claims they owe and fighting claims where claimants are phony. We indicated taxes for all three entities are skyrocketing in the business-as-usual environments. We point out every self-insured entity, insurance carriers and TPA’s regularly use surveillance as a tool to fight WC fraud and properly manage losses. Governmental bodies that don’t do so are misusing government funds and paying claims they don’t owe.
We were advised our comment about the State of Illinois was incorrect—they do use surveillance. We apologize and retract that statement. We are told the State of Illinois uses surveillance regularly. Their goal is to insure they only pay claims that are bona fide; benefits are stopped if surveillance efforts are fruitful.
We were also somewhat surprised to learn the State and its legal officers aren’t acting when they learn of workers’ compensation fraud based on surveillance. For reasons we don’t understand, they don’t prosecute. As taxpayers, we hope that trend does not continue and the state gets more aggressive when they learn a state worker is working when collecting TTD or other fraudulent actions are being committed.
We also hope some day the County of Cook and City of Chicago get serious and start actually investigating work injury claims and prosecuting phonies. Until then, your taxes are going to continue to skyrocket under administrations that continue to wink at stealing and fraud in the workers’ compensation arena.
Please feel free to provide your thoughts and comments.
