New York: Videotape Shows Significant Discrepancy Between Claimant’s Claimed Condition of Disability and Reality

The claimant violated N.Y. Workers’ Comp. Law § 114-a by knowingly making a material misrepresentation, which disqualified him from receiving future indemnity benefits, where surveillance videos showed him stooped over and walking very slowly, using a cane and wearing a back brace, and struggling to get into an automobile when walking into a doctor’s and the Board’s offices, but showed him walking normally and getting in and out of an automobile without difficulty on those and other days; and, although the doctor later testified that the claimant’s condition could fluctuate from time to time during a day and that pain medication could affect his symptoms, the doctor further testified that the degree of fluctuation reflected in the videos was not medically consistent with the diagnosed condition of a temporary total disability and treatment thereof.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the co-Editor-in-Chief and 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 Matter of Ringelberg v. John Mills Elec., 2021 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4176 (3d Dept., June 24, 2021)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 39.03.

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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