The Supreme Court in Montana has been asked to hear a case about privacy rights and workers’ compensation. Lawyers are arguing that fraud investigators have shared confidential information with people who didn’t have the right to see it. They want the court to put a stop to that practice.
Instances of fraud can take place with every type of insurance. The general perception seems to be that people who file a workers’ compensation claim are probably doing it fraudulently. However, this does not mean that each and every person who files a workers’ compensation claim is committing fraud. There are plenty of people who truly do qualify for this type of insurance benefit.
In Montana, two lawyers have asked the Montana Supreme Court to prevent workers’ compensation investigators from doing things that violate the privacy rights of the people who file a workers’ comp claim. They want the court to stop the investigators from sharing confidential criminal justice information until it has been proven that the investigators are doing it lawfully.
They also want the court to make the investigators stop sharing this type of information until the court declares that the people who have already received the confidential information cannot use it “for any purpose”. The lawyers are not seeking monetary damages in this case.
The lawyers say that the Montana State Fund Fraud Investigators have been sharing surveillance videos and other types of confidential information with the doctors of the people who have filed workers’ compensation claims. The lawyers are concerned because the investigators are not usually getting a court order that allows them to release this type of information before they share it with the doctors. The investigators also are not making the people who filed the claims aware that this information has been shared, or with whom it was shared.
In the petition to the Montana Supreme Court, the lawyers have some interesting statistics. They say that around 14,000 people are covered by the State Fund each year. The Fund’s investigative unit conducts video surveillance on somewhere between 400 and 500 people who have filed a workers’ comp claim each year. The lawyers say these videos are shown to the doctors who are providing treatment to the claimants between 100 and 150 times in a given year.
It seems that it is possible that the doctors were influenced by the surveillance videos that they were shown. This could affect the type of health care the person receives. It also could have an impact on a person’s workers compensation claim.
The lawyers say that since 2006, surveillance videos were shown to doctors around 825 times. However, the problem is that the attorneys for the State Fund investigators only received permission from a court to share those videos with doctors around 64 times.
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