The 5-Year Rule for a Georgia Workers’ Compensation Case

Todd Ross, Esq.

Because the Workers’ Compensation Act in the State of Georgia is derived from legislative statutes and Board Rule implementation, there are numerous deadlines throughout the process of each claim.

For example, there are deadlines associated with each of the following: timely payment of indemnity benefits; timely payment and approval of medical care; filing of a controvert; filing of the WC-1, WC-3, WC-2, WC-4, WC104, etc. There are also deadlines for timely notice and filing of claims by an injured employee. Additionally, all of the deadlines from Georgia’s Civil Practice Act also apply.

Additionally, there is a critical deadline to the Board’s jurisdiction to even hear a claim which has not been accepted as compensable. That deadline is referred to as the 5-year rule. At O.C.G.A. § 34-9-100(d)(1), the Georgia Legislature wrote the most recent version of the 5-year rule:

“For injuries occurring on or after July 1, 2007, any claim filed with the Board for which neither medical nor income benefits have been paid shall stand dismissed with prejudice by operation of law if no hearing has been held within five years of the alleged date of injury.”

Here, the Legislature set a finite amount of time for the Board to hear a claim of occupational injury. Other provisions of the statute specifically exclude occupational disease claims from this 5-year rule.

A specific claim assigned to me illustrates an application of the 5-year rule. In January 2016, former counsel for an injured employee filed a WC-14 request for a hearing and alleged an injury date from December 2015. The Board scheduled a hearing. Next, counsel for the injured employee withdrew and new counsel was obtained by the injured employee. Counsel for the injured employee voluntarily removed the claim from the Board’s active hearing calendar several times. Throughout the claim, a total of four different WC-14 filings requesting a hearing were voluntarily withdrawn from the hearing calendar.

Across seven calendar years, a hearing was scheduled seventeen different times. Importantly, this was an alleged date of the accident for which neither medical bills nor income benefits had ever been paid. Over the life of the claim, the employee was scheduled for a deposition on multiple occasions and eventually provided deposition testimony twice. After I asserted the 5-year rule as a defense and statutory bar to the Board’s jurisdiction to even hear the case, counsel for the injured employee voluntarily dismissed the claim.

Application of the 5-year rule to any claim is certainly rare. However, the specific example provided demonstrates that the deadline to have the Board hear a claim is equally as important as every other deadline contained within Georgia’s Workers’ Compensation system.