OWCP: We Can Help With Your Denied Injury Claims

Each year, OSHA publishes federal agency injury and illness statistics (https://www.osha.gov/dep/fap/fap-inj-ill-stats.html). On average, about 3.2% of federal employees have APPROVED OWCP CLAIMS. At the bottom of the page, it says that the data DOES NOT INCLUDE DENIED CLAIMS. OWCP work injury claims get denied for a variety of reasons, but generally it’s due to an overall lack of understanding of how claims are denied or accepted.

To begin, injured federal employees don’t know what to do when they are injured.

Here’s what to do:

1. Report your injury to your supervisor immediately.
2. Tell your supervisor to authorize medical care with a CA16 and select a doctor who can help you.
3. Fill out a CA1 or CA2 with your supervisor so that OWCP has a record of your injury.
4. Get a receipt from the CA1 or CA2. This is page 4 of the CA1 and page 3 of the CA2.
5. For CA1 injuries, elect COP or sick and annual leave if you need time off work.

The next problem is that supervisors often don’t know what to do when you are injured, and they sometimes are less than helpful as a result (see the list above for what to do when an injury occurs).

The third problem that causes denied claims is when the injured employee selects a doctor who isn’t trained in OWCP. Untrained doctors will write bad reports that get injury claims denied. Untrained doctors also don’t understand the OWCP system and won’t know how to ecomp reports so claims can be considered at all.

The forth problem is when injured federal employees don’t know that they have a right to file on OWCP for their work injuries. These patients go to their family doctor or chiropractor and use their health insurance, which not only costs them a lot of money out of their own pockets, but it guarantees that the work injury will never be counted in OSHA’s annual reports.

Denied OWCP work injury claims lead to lost time from using your sick and annual time, lost money from paying copays and deductibles, lost mileage from not being able to be reimbursed for driving, and lost schedule awards that are only available when your injury claim is accepted.