Paul Petrie’s new Addendum is entitled “WCB at the Crossroads: Experience Rating and Claim Suppression – An Addendum to “Restoring the Balance” – April 2025.” It is an appropriate name for the scope and importance of this report.
The “experience rating” funding process is often not well known by workers. But as this Addendum and other research makes clear, ER is fundamental to how employers relate to, and sometimes game, the compensation system and consequently, how they respond to injured workers. This Addendum makes it clear how critical this topic is for a worker-centred compensation system.
The 16 page Addendum is Petrie’s second report on claim suppression, both emanating from his 2018 Report “Restoring the Balance A worker-centred approach to workers’ compensation policy”. In 2018, Petrie recommended that the Board commission an independent research study into the nature and extent of claim suppression in B.C. When that study was completed, he summarized the findings in his first Addendum “Claim Suppression: The Elephant in the Workplace”. Now, three years of research and FOI requests later, Petrie finds that the Board has done almost nothing to address the ever-growing problem of claim suppression and so has issued this second Addendum.
Here are some of this Addendum’s highlights:
- Petrie summarizes how compensation policy structures an assessment system for charging employers, using one of two methods – the method of “Collective Liability” and the method of “Experience Rating” or ER.
- Petrie defines each funding method and how, in practice, the funding method molds and affects the conduct of both the Board and employers. In B.C., the Board started using the ER method in the 1990s.
- Petrie concludes that the ER system of funding strikes a 3-fold blow to the benefits, entitlements and safety of injured workers. He summarizes its impact as follows (p. 7):
- ER incentivizes claim suppression. When claims are successfully supressed or un-reported, workers are denied their right to compensation.
- It re-introduces the adversarial system into compensation and inhibits the inquiry system “at the heart of workers compensation entitlement”.
- Workers are pressured to return to work as soon as possible, often before it is safe and thereby exposing them to reinjury.
And as Petrie notes, B.C. is not the only jurisdiction to identify the negative impact of the ER funding method. In a 2012 Ontario report “Funding Fairness”, author Harry Arthurs addressed the then emerging evidence that ER was creating incentives for abuse such as claim suppression. Arthurs concluded that ER effectively created a “moral crisis” for the Board since it had failed to take adequate steps to forestall or punish claim suppression practices.
Petrie concludes that “the time has come to echo Harry Arthurs’ guidance” and calls on the Board of Directors to address the “moral crisis” that ER has created in B.C.. He recommends that the Board discontinue its corrosive ER policy and re-instate the principle of collective liability.
- Recommendation #35:
That the WCB Board of Directors initiate the steps necessary to transition from the current experience rating system to a collective liability focused funding mechanism in consultation with representatives from the worker and employer communities and with injured workers.
For all of the reasons in set out in this important Addendum on claim suppression, we agree – Petrie’s Recommendation #35 should be adopted without delay.