It’s a felony in the state of Illinois to not carry workers’ compensation insurance if you have any employees.  Doesn’t matter if they are full time or part time or when they started.

We’ve seen less and less employers that are willing to break the law because the penalties for doing so are really stiff. It still happens of course, but not as often.

What we are seeing an uptick of is an employer telling their employees that they do not have workers’ compensation insurance when in fact they really do.

They do this of course to discourage employees and try and get you to put your medical care through your group insurance plan.  They are only looking out for themselves when they do this.   Other times they falsely promise to pay you for any out of pocket expenses or missed time if you tell the doctor that you got hurt at home or somewhere else.  It’s all a scam to screw you over.

The good news is that we can quickly and anonymously check to see if your employer does in fact have insurance.  All we need is their Federal Tax ID number or their business name and we can look in to a database that stores all of that information.  You’d be surprised how many employers truly do have coverage, but just choose to lie to their employees instead of doing the right thing.

There are still options if there isn’t insurance coverage, but you’ll find that it’s there more often than not, even when they tell you otherwise.