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| | Disbarred Lawyer Served As Workers' Compensation Judge Within A Secret Web Of Deceptions And Falsehoods
By Boswell Parker - March 27, 2014
In the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, actor Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, a 1950s young man who tries to pass himself off as a member of high society. His talent lies in his ability to impersonate others. In order to protect his charade, Mr. Ripley falsifies legal documents, his date of birth, and college records.
Fortunately, real life is always more fascinating than fiction. Put another way, art imitates life or vice versa. Case in point is Anand K. Verma, a man who for sixteen years served as a workers’ compensation administrative judge with the D.C. Department of Employment Services (DOES), the District agency in charge of dealing with workers’ compensation claims. The problem with Judge Verma is that his license to practice law- much less decide it – was revoked in 1998. The road leading to it was constructed with lies and deception a la Mr. Ripley.
In December 2013, a colleague of Judge Verma unearthed court records showing that Judge Verma was disbarred by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1998 for “chronically deceptive behavior,” a “willingness to knowingly falsify legal documents” and “a serious lack of candor and trustworthiness.”
In 1984, Anand K. Verma was admitted to the Indiana State Bar Association under the name Anand K. Rajan. The next year, he submitted a job application to an insurance company, in which he falsified his date of birth and the dates he attended undergraduate and graduate school in India and the United States. Verma also submitted a letter from the National Law Center at George Washington University that was altered to incorrectly state his dates of attendance, and a purported transcript that misrepresented his dates of birth and attendance at other universities. As a result Verma’s bar license was suspended for one year, but his problems weren’t over.
In 1998, an Indiana court found that Verma made false statements on bar applications in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Both Pennsylvania and Maryland denied bar admission after Verma falsified information. In the Pennsylvania application, records show that Verma falsely claimed to have practiced law in Indiana from 1985 to 1992, though he actually lived in California, Pennsylvania, and D.C. during that time. On his Maryland application, Verma procured or forged a signature of a “David Rivera,” allegedly a member of the Minnesota bar who claimed Verma practiced law in D.C. in 1993. The Minnesota Bar shows no record of a “David Rivera.” A 1994 letter Verma sent to Maryland bar officials also misrepresented the extent of his prior discipline in Indiana and falsely stated that he never had a formal hearing there, the court found. In disbarring Verma, the Indiana justices said, “We view him as unable, truthfully and within the bounds of basic precepts of professional ethics, to represent the causes of others as an officer of this court.”
The disbarment did not deter Verma from applying and obtaining a highly coveted administrative law judge position in D.C. despite the fact that D.C. municipal regulations require that its workers’ comp judges be licensed in either the District or some other jurisdiction in the United States. Needless to say that the D.C. work comp system, like most others, suffered from adequate funding which may have led to shoddy oversight when hiring and unenforceable standards once hired. No one bothered to review the judge’s credentials—for at least 16 years—or they might have intervened sooner. Anand K. Verma resigned once his lie was made public.
The deception aside all wouldn’t be all that bad, had Mr. Verma issued well-reasoned, fair, and decent decisions. Instead, most who appeared before him felt they were jipped of a proper hearing and scores of his decisions were tossed out on appeal. In more than fifty percent of the time the appellate body, the Compensation Review Board (CRB), rejected Verma’s rulings with scorn, sharply worded opinions, and chided Verma for ignoring the law and the facts of the case.
He was stubborn too. When overruled and instructed to re-hear a case, Verma would issue a decision similar to his last one. In one case, the CRB saw no way to adequately and fairly resolve the matter when it ruled, “Given the continued failure of [the judge] to follow instructions to apply the law to the facts appropriately we are vacating the decision for the third time and ordering a new hearing”. Remaining stubborn is not the best practice to employ if Verma’s desire was to keep his secret to himself and remain off the radar. Workers’ comp lawyer Benjamin Boscolo echoed others when he said, “I wish I could say I’m surprised. Verma would basically say, ‘No, I’m not gonna do what you told me.’ He didn’t follow the rule of law. It was frustrating to go before him. You never knew what to expect.” Such recalcitrance delays employee benefits, increases litigation cost, and generally undermines a fragile workers’ compensation system.
While it is too soon to tell what this means for the parties who appeared before Verma in all his years on the bench, some veteran judges say that scores of his decisions could be tossed on grounds that the parties before him were deprived of a proper hearing. What is certain is that there needs to be a policy in place to deal with unlicensed lawyers who are judges. Had Verma not resigned it would have been extremely difficult to unload a judge from the payroll because of [the District’s] merit system. Also, it is difficult to tell whether the Verma scandal is an isolated incident or perhaps D.C. has only scratched the surface.
Currently, the DOES agency doesn’t have a permanent boss. It’s hard to discern who is responsible for the workers’ comp judges. DOES General Counsel, Tonya Sapp, says in an email that she “provides legal advice to any program within DOES that requests it, including the workers’ compensation program,” but has no supervisory role. “I am an employee of the Office of the Attorney General and thus, have no authority to supervise any employees of DOES,” she says. Interim DOES Director Thomas Luparello, previously the chief information officer, says in an email that the department now requires annual verification of judges’ legal credentials—since discovering “the legal impediment of an ALJ.” To lawyers and judges familiar with the D.C. system, Verma was successful in his deceit as DOES was an overburdened panel with no consistent leadership, lost in a neglectful bureaucracy.
Whereas in The Talented Mr. Ripley the film ends with actor Matt Damon sitting alone in his room crying knowing that he got away with his impersonation, Mr. Verma's real life plight ends with him getting caught in his web of lies while injured workers cry knowing justice eluded them.
Real life is more painful than fiction.
Boswell Parker is the nom-de-plume of a Southern California freelance writer who has worked within the workers' compensation and legal systems.
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