Florida Turns Workers Using Fake Social Security Numbers Into Fraudulent Workers' Compensation Claimants
By Lonce LaMon - August 20, 2017
An exploitive legal twist, rife with potential personal peril for undocumented workers, now exists in Florida for undocumented workers who become claimants of workers’ compensation, and even for workers who don't truly become claimants.
Like California, Florida injured workers are entitled to workers’ compensation benefits independently of legal or illegal work status. But in 2003, Florida's lawmakers added a catch, making it a crime to file a workers' comp claim using a fake identification. Since then, insurers have avoided paying for injured immigrant workers' lost wages and medical care by repeatedly turning them in to the state.
Employer exploitation can go like this: Imagine that hypothetically a worker is hired by a landscaping company and uses a social security card/number not his own. There is no way within his illegal immigrant status he can get a social security number without borrowing one and engaging in a form of identity theft. Most work cannot be attained without a social security number.
So, upon application for employment, the employer takes the social security number for granted as authentic.The employer turns a blind eye to any possibility the social security number could not belong to the employee. It’s to this employer’s advantage not to know if the social security number is fraudulent; that’s because if it doesn’t truly belong to the employee, the company can legally challenge any benefit entitlements for workers’ compensation and defer any investigation to the time of an injury. If the number doesn’t match the employee, the company can notify the state and have the employee arrested and potentially deported for illegal immigration status. Then, all medical and indemnity benefits can be denied.
It’s an easy way to deny a claim after having benefited from weeks, months, and even years of an employee-turned-claimant’s hard work. It’s reminiscent to what has happened relevant to the Social Security Death Master List. For years, many insurers turned a blind eye to life insurance policy holders who died in order to avoid paying death benefits on Life Insurance policies. Beneficiaries who didn’t know they were beneficiaries on a Life Insurance Policy weren’t notified by the Life Insurers. Benefits went unpaid using the “blind-eye-behavior-pattern”.
California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones made a to-do in the recent past about Life Insurers not cross referencing the Social Security Death Master list. He has since made it mandatory that insurers use and cross reference the Social Security Death Master list in order to contact beneficiaries concerning their benefits when policy holders die. Jones has confronted and sought punishment against insurers not complying.
California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones talks to reporters at a News Conference at the Orange County District Attorney's office in Santa Ana on April 20th 2017. photo by Lonce LaMon, all rights reserved
Reported on NPR News Investigations and heard on All Things Considered, Nixon Arias, a 31-year-old native of Honduras, was working for a landscaping company when he suffered an accident, seriously injuring his lower back, in November 2013. After starting treatment provided by his employer’s workers’ compensation insurance, the insurance company then discovered Arias had been using a deceased man’s social security number. A recommended surgery and all of his past and future care were then rejected.
Arias then hired an attorney to help him obtain the benefits that Florida law states all employees are entitled to receive – independent of residence or work permit status. But Arias was consequently pulled over in his vehicle and arrested, while his toddler watched from his car seat.
Arias was charged with using a false social security number to get a job and to file for workers' comp. The state insurance fraud unit had been tipped off by a private investigator hired by his employer's insurance company.
With his back still in pain from three herniated or damaged disks, Arias spent a year and a half in jail and immigration detention before he was deported.
Workers just like Nixon Arias have been charged with felony workers' compensation fraud when their injuries are real and happened on the job. Then in a further twisted use of bad logic, immigrants can be charged with workers' comp fraud even if they've never been injured or filed a claim. This is just because it is illegal to secure employment using a fake Social Security card.
What’s now happening in Florida, could spread to other states, or could be stopped by Florida lawmakers considering the present dichotomy that was not anticipated to fuel an exploitive system.
lonce@adjustercom.com
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