BrickStreet Vows to Audit Every W. Va. Employer for Workers’ Comp

West Virginia’s workers’ compensation insurance provider has a lofty goal: to audit every one of West Virginia’s 38,000 employers this year.

That would require an unprecedented 200 audits a day, and may be a little optimistic, said Greg Burton, president and chief executive officer of BrickStreet, which took over the now-privatized system in January.

“We expect, for some reasons, there will be some stragglers,” he said.

In the past, the Workers’ Compensation Commission typically audited 3,000 to 4,000 employers each year.

Harry Mahler, BrickStreet Mutual’s vice president of underwriting, said most employers — about 21,000 smaller companies — will be audited by mail this year. Another 11,000 larger, more complex businesses will be audited by phone. The rest will be audited in person.

The audits will examine the period from Jan. 1 to July 1 to verify that payrolls were as reported and job classifications were accurate.

All three audit methods are already under way with help from five auditing firms that BrickStreet hired.

Those who don’t respond to audit requests risk cancellation, Burton said.

BrickStreet policyholders who haven’t made premium payments for the second half of 2006 had until the close of business Tuesday, August 1 before their policies were subject to cancellation.

As of last Friday, nearly 3,500 businesses still owed at least $4.6 million in premium payments.