Your humble blogger, as a zealous advocate for the workers’ compensation defense community, often has feelings of frustration when law enforcement, both on the local and the state level, appears dedicate to driving desperate businesses towards extinction while ignoring the blatant fraud and exploitation practiced by certain workers’ compensation fraudsters.

Being a man of the world, your humble blogger gets it – business have money that can be taken through fines and penalties, and employees just have receipts for how they spent the ill-gotten money as soon as they ill-gotten it.  Money helps pay salaries and retirement funds and gourmet coffee in the District Attorney’s break room, while pursuing employees just gets an unenforceable verdict and (possibly) some incarceration.

That being said, San Bernardino’s district attorney’s office seems to take a different tack.  Recently, Roberto Carlos Mendoza-Lazo was charged with Identity Theft and Attempted Perjury, after the Workers’ Compensation Fraud Unit began investigating his activities.  It was discovered that he was fraudulently using someone else’s social security numbers (that’s numbers, folks, not number, because they came from more than one person) and was receiving workers’ compensation benefits as well.

This is a common enough occurrence – someone who is in the country illegally will fraudulently obtain a social security number (or numbers) to obtain employment and benefits.  This has several implications for the benefits to which that person would be entitled under California’s workers’ comp system, but it is also a crime, one which some DA’s offices are not interested in prosecuting and deterring.

San Bernardino’s DA’s office is not the only one to help protect the employers from this type of fraud, but it deserves honorable mention none-the-less.  Good luck to DDA Scott Byrd with this case!