You want to keep your employees safe and will do everything necessary to help them receive treatment and recover after an injury in the workplace. But what happens when you begin to suspect rising rates of injury fraud among your employees? It’s a tricky topic to navigate. Here are some tips for avoiding such a situation in your workplace.
Create a Clear Policy
An important first step in preventing injury fraud in your workplace is creating a clear policy regarding workers’ compensation. The policy should be precise, readable and should cover each point that your employees need to know regarding workers’ compensation claims.
The policy should be structured to ensure employees understand the benefits of your workplace’s workers’ compensation program, and also that they understand their obligations in the process. For example, the policy could state that any suspicions of injury fraud will be investigated and that, when warranted, legal action will be taken against cases of fraud that are discovered.
Encourage Immediate Reporting
Employees should be encouraged to report workplace injuries as soon as they occur. They should also know that you take their safety seriously and that they won’t face negative consequences for filing valid claims. From an employer’s perspective, getting an employee to report an injury as soon as it happens is the key to helping the person get treatment and recover sooner, which can help minimize costs.
Investigate Claims
Investigate workers’ compensation claims that are filed in your workplace. This investigation will first help you ensure that each claim is accurate, being held consistently with previous claims and is also within the law. When employees know that each injury claim will be investigated, this may help to thwart fraud.
The investigations may also uncover safety hazards that you can resolve to make the workplace safer and prevent similar future injuries. When investigating for fraud in a claim, look for such clues as stories that contradict each other, no witnesses to the injury and claims that immediately follow a major workplace change.
Get Employees Back to Work
The sooner you can get employees back to work after an injury, the better. Employees who return to work sooner often don’t have as high of medical costs and may be less tempted to ‘milk’ their injuries. An effective method for getting employees back to work sooner includes creating a light-duty work option that helps injured employees ease back into normal work duties. Of course, you shouldn’t push employees to return to work sooner than the injuries allow because this can result in legal complications and a recurring injury.
Provide Fraud Training
Train your business’s management and human resources teams on how to look for injury fraud and how to report possible injury fraud. These teams should also be up to date on the latest workplace safety standards so that they can take necessary steps to keep employees safe and reduce the number of workplace injuries.
Also, according to 5 Things you Must Know about Denied and Rejected Claims, all staff who work with claims in your company should be properly trained in the filing process. Proper training regarding the filing of claims can help reduce the number of denied and rejected claims.
Injury fraud in the workplace is something no employer wants to deal with. Avoid such a situation by creating a clear accident policy, by investigating all claims of employee injuries and by implementing a program that will help employees get back to work sooner.