California: Staffing Agency Operator Required to Pay $37,000 in Restitution Following Guilty Plea in Workers’ Comp Fraud Case

California’s restitution statute allows for recovery of a broad variety of economic losses resulting from a defendant’s criminal conduct. Accordingly, where the defendant, the operator of an employment staffing agency, pled guilty to workers’ compensation insurance fraud that was based on fraudulently misrepresenting that nurses who were placed in residential care and skilled-nursing facilities were actually computer programmers, it was appropriate for the trial court to require the defendant to pay some $37,000 in premiums the insurer would have earned in the absence of the misrepresentations. The criminal defendant could not be aided by the contention that he could have established that the nurses were independent contractors for whom no workers’ compensation premiums would have been paid.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See People v. Riddles, 2017 Cal. App. LEXIS 259 (Mar. 23, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 152.01.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law