Skewed Justice

When the Legislature reformed California’s workers’ compensation law in 1991, the goal was to shut down rampant fraud that had pushed up insurance premiums and threatened to overwhelm small businesses. But instead of going after those doctors and lawyers who had bilked a system meant to aid injured workers, prosecutors in Los Angeles have targeted workers, often immigrants in low-skilled, dangerous jobs.

Times staff writers Ted Rohrlich and Evelyn Larrubia have documented a disturbing pattern of prosecution by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. In the past eight years, the office’s anti-fraud unit, funded by the state’s employers, has gone after 250 mostly low-paid workers accused of defrauding their employers or insurance carriers. Often the prosecutions seem to border on persecution of clearly injured people.

The district attorney has moved against fewer than 20 lawyers and doctors, only about two dozen small or medium-sized employers and not one insurer suspected of defrauding injured workers or their physicians, this despite the fact that D.A. officials say they have evidence of perjury and fraud by company executives.

The pattern poses troubling questions: Has the fact that workers’ comp fraud probes are funded statewide by employers made prosecutors fearful of biting the hand that feeds them? Or have prosecutors simply picked the easy targets, workers who generally plead guilty and are placed on probation and required to pay restitution? To press a fraud claim against a large insurance company means facing a phalanx of lawyers, reams of discovery documents and defiant corporate officials.

This pattern may be similar to that in other California counties, but the lion’s share of the state’s workers’ comp prosecutions comes out of Los Angeles, and the findings should prompt immediate investigation and action here. At a minimum, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti needs to explain why his prosecutors have collected evidence of fraud and perjury and not moved against a single insurance company in eight years.

When it reformed California’s out-of-control workers’ compensation system in 1991, the Legislature did not intend for local prosecutors to focus solely on fraud committed by workers and ignore evidence of fraud by the doctors who treat them or the insurers who cover their bosses.