Workers’ Compensation literally exists to compensate people who are injured at work. Compensation being the operative word.

It is appalling at how often the compensation component is calculated incorrectly. It should be a simple process, but it is not. Let me set the scene.

Each week the insurers get hundreds of new claims coming in. Part of the claims managers role is to calculate the weekly earnings. This sometimes involves obtaining 52 weeks (12 months) of pay slips. On occasion these pay slips are in individual .pdfs or the like, meaning the individual amounts are having to be added up manually 52 times. This is 52 opportunities for a person to make a mistake.

Like all big corporations, the insurers are intentionally understaffed for the amount of work that is required to increase profit margins. As such, the claims managers are under strict time pressure to get the large amount of compensation calculations finished. While I can understand these pressures, if you are in the difficult circumstance of being on workers’ compensation for weeks, months or even years, being underpaid for any period during this is a serious violation of rights and entitlements.

If your job consists of shift allowance/overtime/varying hours, there is a much higher chance of your compensation being calculated incorrectly due the onerous task of calculating the wages.