Mississippi: Employee's Deviation While Traveling Means Injury Claim Is Not Compensable

In a divided decision, the Court of Appeals of Mississippi affirmed a decision by the state's Workers' Compensation Commission that denied workers' compensation benefits to a traveling salesman who suffered severe injuries in an automobile accident and then, one day later, suffered a heart attack. The majority of the court stressed that although the salesman was a traveling employee, as that term is understood within the workers' compensation context, substantial evidence supported the Commission's finding that he had engaged in a substantial deviation at the time of the accident. The employer offered evidence that at the time of the accident, the salesman was en route to his brother's property to deliver a four-wheeler that was to be used the next day in activities totally unrelated to the employment. While the accident occurred between planned sales calls, the reason for his deviation was personal and not at all related to the employment.

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 Matter of Sims v. Delta Fuel, 2020 Miss. App. LEXIS 82 (en banc, Mar. 17, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 17.03.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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