Say what you will about Marty Sharf; the woman’s got guts.
Sharf, who works for the state Department of Labor and Industries, descended into the belly of the beast Friday morning at the Greater Marysville Tulalip Chamber of Commerce meeting.
Sharf works for the agency that is raising worker’s compensation insurance premiums and average of 19 percent next year. The chamber members are the people who will pay that increase.
So it did take a certain amount of bravery on Sharf’s part to face the group of mostly business people.
On the whole, they were a polite lot, but their message was clear: We think your agency is a bureaucratic mess, it supports too much fraud and we’re not happy about having to pay a lot more for something that doesn’t work very well.
Even the chamber’s president, Caldie Rogers, talked of having to wait six months and then enlisting the help of a state lawmaker before she could get any help for a work-related injury.
Gary Means of Gary’s Gutter Service said he’s had three employees who made job injury claims during the past five years and he believed each one was fraudulent, but saw them approved. “The state is going to have to clean up its house before I’ll vote for anything,” he said.
Sharf said the agency is working to become more responsive, acknowledging “there are a lot of problems we need to solve.”
The agency is in its current mess because for many years earnings from investing a reserve fund in the stock market were used to subsidize the program’s expenses, Sharf said. Of course those earnings aren’t there now, so rates are going up to cover the full costs of the program, which have been rising because of ballooning health care costs.
She said the agency hopes to initiate reforms that may reduce costs and will ask the Legislature for approval next year of a number of changes. One of the things the agency hopes to do is to use some of the $35 million now spent in a legal assessment process to help injured workers find jobs.
Job placement is something the agency doesn’t do now.
“We don’t help them get a job. We help them get ready to get a job,” she said.
The agency is also going to change its system to have a lot of calls from clients handled by a call center, freeing up claims managers to make quicker decisions on the more important matters.
Sharf said the agency will also launch some pilot projects aimed at getting people back to work more quickly. It might target specific industries or specific types of injuries to see if it can learn how to speed up the process for people in those categories.
And it also plans to offer help to employers who are willing to modify a job to bring an injured worker back, perhaps by buying some special equipment that will allow the person to do the job.
Many of those in attendance were receptive to the proposed reforms, but they still wanted to see a reduction in fraud.
Sharf acknowledged the agency doesn’t have a big enforcement staff. She estimated that perhaps 5 percent of the cases involved some type of fraud.
“The percentage is small, but it does cost a lot of money,” she said.
She said the fraud the agency does uncover falls mostly in four areas:
While most in the audience liked the idea of a renewed focus on fraud, some were skeptical about an agency shift toward helping people with job placement.
“How can you talk about job placement when what you’re supposed to be doing now isn’t being done very well?” asked David Rumsay, a certified public accountant. “It’s frustrating.”
Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com
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