Claims suppression (employer actions to discourage or hinder appropriate reporting of workplace incidents or illnesses) has long been identified as a key concern by the injured worker community. In a perverse outcome, the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s experience rating, intended to improve workplace safety, has provided a financial incentive for employers to minimize claim costs.
In 2022 a research team from McMaster University, the Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups (ONIWG) and legal clinic advocates launched an investigation into workplace injury reporting and under-reporting to gauge the accuracy of Ontario’s safety records — and to learn how injured workers were faring in accessing the workers’ compensation system. Their study yielded an unexpected finding: that many of the workplace incident reports filed with the WSIB by healthcare professionals could not be matched with documentation filed by the worker or employer, and as a result were not converted into a compensation claim. This raised questions of why workers were reluctant to file a claim and additional concerns that employers were pressuring injured workers, especially vulnerable immigrant or precarious workers , to not report accidents.
Professor Stephanie Premji (McMaster, Department of Labour Studies), Chris Grawey and Orlando Buonastella of Injured Workers Community Legal Clinic (IWC), and Steve Mantis (ONIWG) have been meeting with WSIB management for multiple years to discuss the epidemic of claim suppression, and gathering data from Freedom of Information requests to determine what the WSIB has done about this critical issue.
In 2024, Professor Premji was awarded a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to study the phenomena of claim suppression at the WSIB. This research project will include a jurisdictional scan of all provincial and territorial workers’ compensation Boards to better understand how each jurisdiction handles claim suppression in legislation and/or policy – if at all. This will be followed by interviews with key informants, including injured workers, advocates and officials at the various compensation boards. The goal of the project is to identify the problems related to claim suppression and provide solutions which can improve outcomes for injured workers.
We will keep you posted!
Read more:
- Mercer, Shane. 2025 Apr. 3. “Concerns about claim suppression in Ontario: Data shows tens of thousands of injury reports unmatched to claims filed.” Canadian Occupational Safety.
- Premji, Stephanie, Momtaz Begum & Kishower Laila. 2025 Jan. 26. “Claim suppression of occupational injuries and illnesses among precariously employed immigrant workers in Ontario.” New Solutions 35(1): 9-21
- Endicott, Marion. 2025 Jan 6. “Perverse outcomes: notes from the field on how financial incentives in Ontario’s workers’ compensation system cause harm to a public institution and create a new occupational hazard.” New Solutions 35(1):73-80
- Mojtehedzadeh, Sara. 2025 Jan. 2. “Tens of thousands of potential workplace injury reports filed by doctors are sitting in limbo. Are they a sign of a deeper problem?” Toronto Star
- Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups. Research Action Committee. 2022 Jun. 2. Letter to the WSIB President & CEO re: Claim Suppression, Non-reporting and Abandoned Claims. Thunder Bay: ONIWG