Washington: Worker’s “Innocent Misrepresentation” Leads to Erroneous Benefit Payments for Seven Years

Where an “unknown person” assisted an injured worker complete a report of injury soon after the work-related incident and, because of a language barrier and the fact that the worker was heavily medicated at the time, the form indicated the worker was married, with one child, when in fact he was unmarried and had no children, it was appropriate more than seven years later for the Department to issue an order assessing an overpayment of $100.86, based on the amount the worker was overpaid between the time the Department learned his true marital status and the time he was placed on a pension, held the Supreme Court of Washington. It was also appropriate to change the worker’s marital status from married to unmarried effective the date it learned his true status. The Court reversed a decision of the state’s Court of Appeals that held the Department was without authority to make the changes. Stressing that the overpayment was caused solely by an innocent misrepresentation and not by adjudicator error, the Court said the Department’s rulings were timely. The Court added that under its ruling, overpayments made solely for one of the reasons listed in RCW 51.32.240(1)(a) could be recouped within one year of the payment, regardless of whether the underlying order was temporary or binding.

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 Birrueta v. Department of Labor & Indus., 2016 Wash. LEXIS 1012 (Sept. 15, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 131.05.

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