Reporting Various Audit Phases

For a law firm in Great Falls, their specialty lies in dealing with workmen's compensation cases and they criticized a particular report that originated from the legislature's Audit Committee on the state Workmen's Compensation Division. On a yearly basis, the state agency spends millions of dollars to pay workers for job related illness and injury and this is why there is a document serving to contend the audit which focused too much on the unfavorable aspects of their operations. What this audit report contained are allegations of abuses by division officials, lawyers, and doctors in the handling of workmen's compensation cases.

It is the author of a pamphlet which was submitted to the legislature's Select Committee on Workmen's Compensation which is also part of this firm as a lawyer. According to him and another lawyer, the report should have concentrated more on finding ways to help working men and women. The Workmen's Compensation audit is an intensive and expensive audit and as the news media covered various phases over a couple of months, there has been a search for any indications of whether or not the laboring people who will become disabled during the course of their employment will be its beneficiaries.

As the lawyer wrote, the audit is very broad in scope and it is unfortunate for it to have been founded on a base of rumors and suspicion concerning at least most of the lawyers who practice before the division. What became a full blown attorney general's investigation is this audit investigation and it resulted to one conviction for theft and fraud and three other criminal charges filed. An alleged runner for a lawyer, two lawyers, and a legal secretary ended up being convicted of several charges in this case.

Suggesting that good people should not be shackled with this suspicion is the lawyer because when it comes to the final analysis it is always assumed that dishonesty and abuses are the rule. There is a strong burden that comes with the rules and regulations designed almost entirely to prevent what apparently is assumed to have been the abuses of the past and the good people should be freed from this according to him. With regard to the document, it took issue with a particular segment of the audit which concerned the contended lawyers seeking doctors with noninterventionist attitudes to perform medical examinations on clients with workmen's compensation claims. According to the lawyer, what lacks objectivity is the innuendo that doctors who prepare medical evaluations are anything but honest. The audit report did not include anything on obtaining medical reports from many orthopedists. Members of the neurological fraternity in any way. As mentioned by a well known orthopedic surgeon, no one is entitled to anything that he did not earn legitimately. A number of injured working people are handled by this doctor annually.

It was this document that ended up refuting an audit recommendation discouraging lump sum settlements in workmen's compensation cases as well. As two lawyers coming from the same firm said, many abuses are opened up through the practice of allowing an injury claim to be paid in one large sum but a single award has its fair share of benefits too. According to the lawyers, a seriously injured worker who has to settle for weekly payments of $100 or less for a long period will find it extremely difficult to pay debts or enter into another business to make up for his disability.