Performance Bonuses for Forcing Disabled Workers Back to Work

"For those of you who have wondered if WCB employees receive performance awards when they send injured workers back to work, you can now be assured that they do in fact receive blood money for sending disabled workers back to work when they are not able to return to work. In many cases a primary care doctor will fill out Form C-050 indicating their patient is not capable of any work and the Case Manager will obtain a second opinion from a WCB Medical Advisor who provides a dissenting opinion. The Case Manager would thus be eligible for a performance award by ignoring the primary care doctor's opinion and informing the disabled worker that they must return to work, thus fulfilling her commitment in forcing a disabled worker back to work when they are not capable of performing any work. Great system we have eh! - Gerry Miller"

The following is from the January 29, 2008 Alberta WCBS MEETING OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS - SUMMARY, MINUTES:

Board of Directors’ Meeting of January 29, 2008

Website Summary

2007 Corporate Performance and Goal Sharing Results

Decision

The Board of Directors approved payment of performance awards to eligible WCB employees, within the overall 2007 administrative budget of $146.7 million.

Rationale

The WCB had a successful year as indicated in the 2007 corporate scorecard results. The following table summarizes the 2007 corporate objectives and key performance measures:

Strategic Objective	Performance Measure
Focus on Return to Work	Through timely medical and vocational interventions, maintain 2006 performance by managing return to work outcomes on cases lasting longer than three months to within 5% of an active claim count of 1,077 cases. 2007 Target: 1,132 active duration cases 2007 Result: 936 – 17% better than target
Commitment to Fairness	Improve the quality of customer communication by exceeding an 80% quality score on key decision communication letters. 2007 Target: 80% 2007 Result: 87.7% – well above target
Commitment to Fairness	Increase the number of electronic customer self-service transactions processed by WCB systems 15% from our baseline of 1,834,7931. 2007 Target: 2,110,0122 2007 Result: 2,300,859 – an increase of 25.4%

Commentary by Gerry Miller, long time WCB critic:

For those of you who have wondered if WCB employees receive performance awards when they send injured workers back to work, you can now be assured that they do in fact receive blood money for sending disabled workers back to work when they are not able to return to work. In many cases a primary care doctor will fill out Form C-050 indicating their patient is not capable of any work and the Case Manager will obtain a second opinion from a WCB Medical Advisor who provides a dissenting opinion. The Case Manager would thus be eligible for a performance award by ignoring the primary care doctor's opinion and informing the disabled worker that they must return to work, thus fulfilling her commitment in forcing a disabled worker back to work when they are not capable of performing any work. Great system we have eh!

Gerry Miller

http://www.wcb.ab.ca/pdfs/public/bod_minutes/jan_summ08.pdf

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