North Carolina State Auditor Finds Expected Errors At Industrial Commission
Workers Compensation uninsureds in North Carolina have been a hot button topic for many months since a newspaper reporter found 30,000 employers without coverage for their employees. A recent audit was released by the NC State Auditor’s department on this very subject.
The NC State Auditor found what was already in the press and on the mind of Governor Pat McCrory when he took office.
A summary of the findings:
- Two sources available for data to cross-match are the Employment Security Commission and the NC Rate Bureau
- During the audit was when the Industrial Commission started to obtain data from the two aforementioned sources
- The NC Industrial Commission did not follow up on the data they were provided by the NC Rate Bureau previously – 11,323 businesses had let coverage lapse in 2012. The Industrial Commission followed up on none of these.
- In 2011, $79,025 was assessed in penalties of which $59,925 was collected.
- In 2012, $6.5 million was assessed of which only 2% had been collected.
- In comparison, South Carolina had collected 75% of the $2.8 million in fines assessed.
- The North Carolina School State School System would have received the fine money if properly assessed and collected.
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In the Industrial Commission’s response, one of the recommendations was to contact states with data matching program. West Virginia was very successful in its fines and collection procedures. West Virginia even posted signs at the businesses or work sites that the employer did not have a policy or other type of coverage.
A good recommendation would be to use Microsoft Access for the data matching. Excel reports could be pulled once the data is converted to a usable database. Is that something the new state agency GBICC (see last article) could do to provide this data? Possibly Is the data matching that hard to accomplish in a short period of time? No.
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