Correcting Minor Errors in Decisions

   By Rosalind Asch-Hobeck

The Workers’ Compensation Board pointed out that throughout the first 11 months of 2024, the Board’s Office of Adjudication oversaw an impressive 220,471 hearings and issued 237,224 decisions. Given the sheer volume of rulings issued annually, it is inevitable that some may contain minor typographical errors or other small inaccuracies. Many times the inaccuracy involves TT instead of TR or TP or a variation thereof.  Many of us have encountered these types of errors.

When a party notices a typographical or minor error in a recently issued decision—such as EC-18R, EC-23, EC-23R, EC-32.3, or NOSD—that is clearly evident from the hearing record, the Board does not want you to file a Request for Further Action (Form RFA-1LC or Form RFA-2) or an Application for Board Review (Form RB-89) and it is not necessary to do so. These formal processes are not required to address straightforward clerical mistakes and in order to help streamline the process, the Board has offered a better solution.

Instead, the party identifying the error should first reach out to the opposing side—whether the claimant’s attorney or the carrier’s attorney—to confirm mutual agreement that the decision requires an amendment. If both parties concur, one of them should then submit a request via email to the Senior Law Judge in the appropriate district, ensuring the other party is copied on the correspondence.  A review of the DAR minutes will confirm the error and the time stamp on the DAR minute review should be noted in the correspondence to assist the Senior Law Judge in locating the error.

Should the request involve more than a simple correction of a minor or typographical error, the Senior Law Judge will advise the parties on the available alternatives to properly address the issue.