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By Posted on Posted in COLA, Commutation, Life Pension, SAWW, Workers Compensation Resources
Jul
20
2026
COLA time!

Good news everyone!  A recent news report suggested the U.S. is headed towards record high life expectancy!  While commutations of life pensions and permanent total disability are effected by the morbidity rate and not life expectancy, this is very much an indication that updated commutation Tables 2 and 3 would result in much higher present values than the 1989 life tables originally used to these charts.

If you are a workers’ compensation professional in need of a consultation on estimating future life pension, permanent total disability, or death benefits, don’t hesitate to reach out.

By Posted on Posted in PDRater
Feb
8
2026

The good news:  I just updated the entire user registration system to help people register and log in a lot easier!  A website software update recently mangled the registration process – it was functional, but ugly.

The bad news:  Many users will discover their accounts had to be reset.  Not to worry!  Just register with your work email address and you should be good to go!

If you’re still having trouble, just drop me an email and I’ll help you out.  :)

By Posted on Posted in PDRater Tagged with ,
Aug
19
2025
Back to the future of comp past

I just couldn’t find a clean unfilled copy of the official “STIPULATION and AWARD and/or ORDER” PDF form. Sometimes PDFs can be weird and it’s just best to find a new clean copy than fill out an old one. However, for a form that gets used all the time in hearing rooms throughout California, I couldn’t find it on the Board forms webpage!

You know how much of a hassle the WCIRB website is?  In order to figure out coverage dates for a given employer you either need to mail in a request and wait a few weeks, ask a judge to pull this information for you, or keep submitting dates and alternate names, submitting CAPTCHA’s to prove your humanity every 5 searches. 1

After a lot of searching, I found that the DWC forms web page must have been heavily updated just after 11/01/2008 because as of the next Archive.org page save, the “DWC WCAB form 5” form for the “STIPULATION and AWARD and/or ORDER” PDF was suddenly missing!  For those that were around at the time, this is back when the DWC website was2 transforming3 into the EAMS system.

Where in the world is the Stipulation and Order?

Anyhow, that’s the long way of saying I found the last version of the DWC WCAB form 5 Stipulation and Order PDF form for your benefit.  :)

  1. Seriously, under what possible circumstances is someone who proves they are human after five consecutive searches in danger of not only being replaced with a robot, but having that robot decide to keep performing searches related to what that human was doing?!? [↩]
  2. slowly [↩]
  3. disintegrating? [↩]