Case Study
Who Owes Whom?
After winning an appeal of his case before the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), a man who had been injured at work expected to receive a substantial sum of money, representing several years’ worth of retroactive worker’s compensation payments. Weeks later, he was astonished to receive a letter from the WSIB asking him how he planned to repay an “overpayment” of $119,239 that he owed to them.
An Ombudsman staff member contacted a caseworker at WSIB, who determined that an administrative error had been made during the calculation of the man’s retroactive payment award – and it had been entered as money he owed, rather than money owed to him. The error was corrected immediately and the man received the funds he expected. He thanked the Ombudsman, saying he “can now sleep at night.”