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A Florida law targeting injured undocumented workers is set to undergo legislative review. Employers and insurance companies have been criticized for using the law to get such workers arrested, and even deported, in order to avoid paying workers’ compensation benefits. The law came into the spotlight following an investigation by ProPublica and NPR to evaluate its impact on undocumented workers. After examining 14 years of Florida insurance fraud statistics and court records, they found around 800 cases of undocumented workers being charged with fraud for using fake Social Security numbers to procure jobs, pursue workers’ compensation claims or both. Click here to read more:

This week, it was announced that a federal jury in Orlando, Florida had found a woman guilty of one count of theft of government funds and two counts of concealing a material fact in connection with the receipt of workers compensation benefits. 54-year-old Susan J. Gissy of Crystal River now faces a maximum penalty of ten years on the theft charge and up to five years on each of the concealment charges. The defendant is scheduled to be sentenced on March 5, 2017. Click here to read more:

How much sleep are employees getting at night? Workplace safety experts are calling this one of the most frequently overlooked but critical questions to answer in employer safety programs due to rising fatigue risks. The Park Ridge, Illinois-based American Society of Safety Engineers is funding an ongoing study on fatigue through the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. The study, which began in August 2015, is surveying what workers think about fatigue and whether they can recognize the signs in their everyday work life, according to researcher Lora Cavuoto, an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Industrial and System Engineering. Click here to read more:

Existing labor shortages could be exacerbated by the impact of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, while managing materials will be key as rebuilding efforts get underway, according to industry sources. Robust construction activity in Texas and Florida had already strained the regions’ labor supply, even before rebuilding efforts and even more demand loomed after the three hurricanes, sources said. Click here to read more:

Recovering from Tropical Storm Harvey will be a dangerous process and can present multiple safety hazards to workers, according to experts. One of the biggest workplace safety risks will be employees completing unfamiliar tasks in the process of recovering from the storm, which made landfall on the Texas Gulf coast as a Category 4 hurricane. “You have all kinds of different hazards that recovery and response workers face,” said Jordan Barab, Washington D.C.-based former deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “You have people working on the roof of houses, you have people working in the contaminated water, you’ve got confined spaces, you have people trying to deal with electrical outages, you have people trying to deal with fallen trees, heavy machinery. There is an uncountable number of hazard that can affect workers.” Click here to read more:

The rise in the use of contract and temporary workers raises questions about who is responsible for their safety in the workplace. But employers who use these workers at their work sites would be unwise to assume that they can offload their responsibility to protect them from injury and illness simply because they are not directly employed by their companies, experts say. “I think that it’s attractive for a lot of companies to have outsourced labor, mainly because it creates a lot of savings for the company,” said Brian A. Richardson, Richmond, Virginia-based director of the litigation practice group at McCandlish Holton Click here to read more:

States that enacted reforms to rein in the high cost of drugs dispensed by physicians to injured workers face an uphill battle as some doctors find loopholes in the regulations. These loopholes mean that workers compensation prescription costs remain stagnant or are rising in some states, leading to calls for additional restrictions on physician dispensing, experts say. Click here to read more:

Employers buying workers compensation coverage in early 2018 are typically seeing slight rate decreases or flat renewals as the competitive market place of the past several years continues, according to brokers. Improved underwriting results, abundant capacity and reforms in various states have kept a lid on increases for most accounts, they say. Click to read more:

Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis today announced the arrest of Oscar M. Palma made by the Department of Financial Services' Disaster Fraud Action Strike Team. Palma, a Fort Myers contractor, was reported to authorities after allegedly making subpar roof repairs to an area apartment complex following Hurricane Irma. Upon launching an investigation, fraud detectives quickly learned that while Palma advertised himself as a licensed and insured contractor, he in fact held no workers' compensation coverage and was not licensed as a contractor. Click here to read more:

Fatalities in the construction sector are on the rise as the industry’s workforce ages and youngsters show no interest in replacing them — a challenge that safety experts are looking to mitigate in part through the use of new technologies. The total number of construction fatalities has been climbing for several years, with 738 deaths reported in 2011 and 991 deaths reported in 2016, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The leading causes of deaths in the construction industry were falls, electrocutions, struck by object, caught in or between equipment, according to the bureau. Click to read more:

Sixty-nine percent of employees surveyed recently reported that they are tired at work, raising workplace safety concerns as many of those employees work in safety-critical jobs, according to a report released Monday by the National Safety Council. The Itasca, Illinois-based organization's report is the third in a series on workplace fatigue and exposes a gap between how employees and employers view the risks and consequences of being tired at work, according to a statement. The survey included input from 2,110 employees, a majority in manufacturing, transportation, and utilities, and 504 employers. Click to read more:

Workers’ compensation claim denial rates increased a little over one percent between 2014 and 2017, according to a white paper published earlier this year by Lockton. The increase is significant because of the increased costs associated with denied claims. The analysis examined denial rates and focused on answering two questions: What’s driving the increase? Is a high denial rate in the best interest of the employer? Click here to read more: