What To Do If Your Minnesota Workers’ Compensation Claim Is Underpaid

We’d like to think our employer has our best interests at heart, but their expenses also go up when a work injury occurs. At the end of the day, your company and the insurance industry have one thing in mind – their bottom line. When your employer and their insurance provider are focused on protecting their interests, sometimes the hard working employee is the one who suffers the most. A work injury will lead to more expenses for your employer and their insurance provider, and unfortunately they sometimes look to minimize expenses by under reporting or underpaying a claim. Today, we take a look at what you should do if you feel like your Minnesota workers’ compensation claim has been underpaid.

Try To Determine Why

One of the best things you can do when you’re facing a potentially underpaid claim is to try and figure out why it happened. Did your doctor change your level of impairment, or did the insurance company not receive a bill for a covered medical procedure? If you can figure out why you’re being underpaid, it will be much easier to rectify the issue.

Gather Documents

Even if you haven’t figured out exactly how you’re getting shortchanged or why your payment amount has decreased, catalog and copy everything you can that’s related to your case. This will make it easier to prove your case or hand it over to a workers’ compensation attorney, which brings us to our next point.

Seek Out Professional Help

If the underpayment is the result of a simple oversight, you may be able to handle the situation on your own, but as we mentioned above, your employer and their insurance company do not share the same interests as you, so there’s a chance that the underpayment was intentional. When this happens, it’s best to seek out the assistance of a workers’ compensation attorney who can examine the extent of your case and point out flaws in the insurance company’s payment. Without expert help, you may not be able to prove your case.

Act Swiftly

Workers’ compensation law in Minnesota has a number of rules and regulation about when you can file and how long you have to appeal a decision if you think you’ve been given the short end of the stick. If you wait too long to file an appeal or challenge an underpayment, your case may be thrown out, even if you were in the right, simply because you missed a deadline. If something is wrong with your payment, don’t delay.

For more information on what you should do if you believe your work comp claim has been underpaid, set up a consultation with Dean Margolis today.