Mississippi: Commission's Sanctions Order Against Employer for Appealing ALJ's Decision Was Inappropriate

The Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission should not have entered an order that required an employer/carrier to pay $4,000 in attorney's fees as a section for appealing an ALJ's order requiring the employer to pay for the replacement of a paraplegic claimant's HVAC and septic tank systems where the appellate court found the employer and carrier had a colorable legal argument in supports of the appeal. Noting that the Mississippi statute--Miss. Code Ann. § 71-3-015(1)--required an employer or carrier to bear the expense of "other apparatus" that was specifically required to treat an injured worker's condition, the court said there was at least a reasonable legal argument that an HVAC system and a new septic tank were not the sort of "other apparatus" called for in the statute. Accordingly, the Commission should not have awarded attorney's fees when the employer appealed the ALJ's order.

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 Gamma Healthcare Inc. v. Estate of Grantham, 2020 Miss. App. LEXIS 666 (Dec. 1, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 94.03.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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