Could WorkCover ever prosecute someone for their own accident? It seems like a possibility. If your own accident is the result of your own negligence, you are the party responsible for causing the accident. They might see your injury as punishment enough, and the usual policy is to lay the blame as high as possible. That would mean that your employer is responsible for your incompetence because they didn't train you adequately. They'd rather assign blame there than with you directly because that has farther-reaching consequences than just blaming you.
But say for a moment that your company has taken a lot of trouble to ensure that you know how to fasten a safety harness. They trained you in it and verified that you were capable of doing so and understood its importance. They even retrained you every month to make sure it stayed fresh in your mind. Then you go out and, unlike hundreds of times before, you fail to fasten your harness properly, due to simple carelessness, and you fall and injure yourself. Now, this is demonstrably not the result of poor training, nor the result of ignorance. It's an on-the-job injury that is at every level your fault. If it were me investigating it and I learned all this, I'd probably just say you did it deliberately to extort insurance money.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - I don't know if WorkCover actually prosecute people.
PPS - If they don't, that would make this a rather pointless post.
4 comments:
They do.
I work for the solicitor that handles their prosecution.
To explain a little further ...
There's a process, and basically, if it is found out while the settlement phase is being worked out that you caused your own accident, then you get nothing, or very little anyway. If it goes to court and comes out then, the judge will give you nothing.
If you are awarded settlement/judgement monies and then WorkCover later find out that it was your fault, or you lied about part of what happened, THEN they prosecute. Prosecution only happens after an award of money.
Most of the cases I've seen have been about people lying about the severity of their injuries, and not the cause of them, because there's generally only two scenarios:
1. The accident is witnessed.
2. The accident isn't witnessed.
In the first case, it is usually difficult to discredit the evidence of witnesses. In the second case, there is no argument of what happened, because the only witness is the Claimant, and so their evidence must be accepted, with regard to the procedures of the employer.
So I guess theoretically you could be prosecuted for your own accident, but it is not a likely scenario. Unless someone comes along after the settlement, pre-court and court period with evidence about what happened that wasn't discovered in any of the discovery phases for those periods.
So that would make it a very unlikely theoretical possibility, and not quite in the terms that I originally conceived. Well, it's good to clear it up, anyway.
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