Pennsylvania: Claimant’s Contention That Third-Party Tort Action Settled for $1 Found Less Than Credible

A Pennsylvania appellate court agreed that a Workers’ Compensation Judge appropriately dismissed a claimant’s Review, Modification and Reinstatement Petitions and agreed that claimant could not recover workers’ compensation benefits because he failed to disclose to the employer or its insurer the monetary amount received in a third-party settlement. The court acknowledged that a settlement agreement in the third-party action indicated settlement had been accomplished upon the payment of $1.00, and other valuable considerations. An attorney testified that such a release was common practice in group settlements involving asbestos litigation, that there had been six plaintiffs in the relevant third-party action, and that such language was used because the various individual plaintiffs typically settled for different amounts. The WCJ found the attorney’s testimony credible, but not that provided by the claimant. The appellate court noted that the WCJ had not capriciously disregarded the testimony offered by the claimant’s witnesses; the WCJ simply found it unhelpful.

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 Reed v. Workers’ Comp. Appeal Bd. (Allied Signal, Inc.), 2015 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 173 (Apr. 21, 2015) [2015 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 173 (Apr. 21, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 116.07 [116.07]

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

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