19 Dec 2019

Florida: Division’s Payment of Annual COLA Tolls Statute of Limitations

Payment of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) by the Division of Workers’ Compensation are the sort of “compensation” outlined in § 440.15(1)(f), held the Supreme Court of Florida. Accordingly, where an employer inexplicably stopped paying an injured worker permanent total disability payments in 1987, but the Division continued to pay him small sums based an annual COLA computations, it was error for a Judge of Compensation Claims to find the worker’s petition untimely, in spite of the fact that the employer had made no actual payments in 40 years. Nothing in the statute [§ 440.15(1)(f)] required that the “compensation” be paid by the employer, held the court.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Phillips v. Tyson Foods, 2019 Fla. App. LEXIS 17494 (1st DCA, Nov. 20, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 126.07.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see