New WCAB Regs, New EAMS Forms

According to a recent DIR news bulletin on November 17, 2008 the new WCAB Rules of Practice and Procedure were approved by the Office of Administrative Law and filed with the Secretary of the State and (apparently) made effective that same day. If you haven’t already reviewed the new regulations, now’s a good time. You can check them using the above links or download it here:

Since the new WCAB rules became effective, the new EAMS forms are now mandatory. The exceptions named in the above bulletin are:

There will be a four-week “transition period” in effect through December 12, 2008 during which the “legacy” ((Read: non-EAMS)) forms will still be accepted.
Forms requiring multiple signatures will be accepted in “legacy” form as long as the filer establishes that circulation began prior to November 17, 2008. ((I suppose the easiest way to demonstrate this is to point out that at least one of the signatures was dated prior to 11/17/2008.))
Unrepresented injured workers will be allowed until February 17, 2009 to use “legacy” forms.
Unrepresented injured workers who do not have access to a computer or typewriter will be allowed to fill in the new OCR forms by printing using block letters. ((Though, I suppose printing clearly in all-capital letters migh work better…)) ((Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk.))

Did you know there’s a handbook for the new Optical Character Recognition EAMS forms? You can check it out here or download it here: