Arkansas: Employer Secured Comp Coverage in Spite of Failure to List Employees in Policy Documents

An Arkansas court held that the owner of a small Arkansas business appropriately secured workers’ compensation coverage when evidence indicated an insurance company issued a policy and the business paid a premium of $1,000. That the policy did not name any employees as being covered thereunder did not alter the fact that the required workers’ compensation coverage had been secured. Moreover, allegations by the injured worker that the business owner had misrepresented payroll and other data to the insurance carrier did not mean the policy was void ab initio, but rather voidable. While the Arkansas statutes allowed penalties to be assessed in some cases, again those penalties did not defeat coverage. The worker’s tort action against the employer was accordingly barred where there was sufficient evidence to support the Commission’s finding that the worker was an employee and where the evidence clearly indicated a policy of insurance was in place. The worker’s contention that he received a 1099 instead of a W-2 and had nothing withheld from his wages did not control.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See Wilhelm v. Parsons, 2016 Ark. App. 56, 2016 Ark. App. LEXIS 52 (Jan. 27, 2016) [2016 Ark. App. 56, 2016 Ark. App. LEXIS 52 (Jan. 27, 2016)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 63.04 [63.04]

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law.

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