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Arkansas: Claimant May Pursue Comp Benefits in Spite of Claim During EEOC Dispute That She Was Capable of Working

January 17, 2014 (1 min read)

A divided Arkansas appellate court recently held that a former employer that paid $60,000 to a former employee to settle the latter’s EEOC & ADA charges might be entitled to at least a partial credit under Ark. Code Ann. § 11-9-807 against future workers’ compensation disability benefits owed to the former employee where the EEOC settlement agreement indicated the sum was being paid as “lost wages.”  The case was remanded for additional findings on that point.  The court agreed with the Commission, however, that the doctrine of judicial estoppel did not bar the former employee from recovery of workers’ compensation disability benefits even though the employee, in her earlier ADA and EEOC claims, contended that she had been able to work during the relevant time period.  The court indicated that here the alleged previous inconsistent position regarding the former employee’s ability to work was made, if at all, in an EEOC proceeding that was settled prior to litigation and not within an "earlier case." No earlier court had relied upon that alleged inconsistent position.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is a leading commentator and expert on the law of workers’ compensation.

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See Parker v. Advanced Portable X-Ray, LLC, 2014 Ark. App. 11, 2014 Ark. App. LEXIS 36 (Jan. 8, 2014) 

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 127.07 

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

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