North Carolina: Employer Entitled to Lien on South Carolina UIM Proceeds

A North Carolina appellate court held that the state’s Industrial Commission correctly concluded that an employer and its insurer could, pursuant to N.C. Gen. Stat. § 97-10.2(f) (2017), assert a subrogation lien for workers' compensation benefits paid to a decedent's widow on the underinsured motorist (UIM) policy proceeds she obtained in her South Carolina wrongful death action. The widow acknowledged that the employer had some sort of lien; she objected to extension of the lien to her UIM recovery. The Court disagreed, noting that under the statute, the employer (and insurer) had a statutory lien against anypayment made by a third-party tortfeasor arising out of an injury or death of an employee subject to the Act.

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 Walker v. K&W Cafeterias, 2019 N.C. App. LEXIS 139 (Feb. 19, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 110.05.

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