Louisiana: Approved Settlement Agreement Can Be Modified to Address SSA Language Requirements

Where an injured worker and his employer/carrier entered into settlement agreement, subsequently approved by a WCJ, calling for payment of $148,574.00 ($8,574.00 of which was to be placed in a Medicare Set-Aside Account) to the worker, and the worker subsequently filed a motion to amend the order of approval on the basis that due to his counsel's inadvertence, the WCJ's order did not include language that expressed the indemnity portion of the settlement in a monthly amount, as required by the Social Security Administration (so that the SSA could properly calculate any federal offset resulting from his simultaneous receipt of workers' compensation benefits and SSDI benefits, it was appropriate for the WCJ to modify the order, held a Louisiana appellate court. The Court acknowledged that while an approved agreement could ordinarily not be modified, here the rights of the employer/carrier were not being modified at all. The modification neither took away nor added anything to the original agreement. Practitioners should observe that the appellate court also awarded the worker’s counsel an additional $3,500 attorney’s fee for work performed on the appeal. 

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance. 

See Clark v. Sedgwick CMS, 17-1063 (La. App. 3 Cir. 05/30/18), 2018 La. App. LEXIS 1074

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, §§ 132.06,157.03.

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