New York: Lack of Written Notice of Injury Excused Where Claimant Told Supervisor of Work-Related Injury

It was within the discretion of New York’s Workers' Compensation Board to excuse a claimant's failure to provide timely written notice where competent evidence indicated the injured worker actually reported her leg injury to her supervisor at the end of a work shift and where the employer offered no conflicting evidence. The court acknowledged that N.Y. Work. Comp. Law § 18 contemplates written notice of injury within 30 days of the accident causing the injury. Failure to provide such written notice can be excused, however, where the Board, utilizing its discretion, determines that notice could not be given or, has here, the employer or one of its agents had knowledge of the accident and the employer had not suffered any prejudice by the lack of written notice. An additional factor in this case was a language barrier; claimant testified through a Gujarati interpreter.

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 Matter of Kinkhabwala v. ADP Totalsource Fl XIX Inc., 2017 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 9287 (3rd Dept. Dec. 28, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 126.03.

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