BATON ROUGE – At the Nov. 2 meeting, the Second Injury Board (SIB) voted and approved the 2018 annual assessment rate, setting it at 6.75%.
This rate is an increase from 5.75% in 2017 due to lower than anticipated benefits reported.
Specifically, 20 million less was reported from benefits paid than in previous years. As a result, the assessment rate needed to be increased to fully fund the reimbursement appropriation for next year. If the SIB assessment rate had not been increased, the direct result would have caused reimbursement on requests from stakeholders to be pushed back by several months.
Additionally, the SIB’s goal of reimbursing its stakeholders within 90 days of receipt of a request cannot be met without fully funding the appropriation.
In recent years, the SIB’s staff has been dedicated to achieving this goal by working to reduce the reimbursement time from 2 years in 2015 to 1 year in 2017. It has been estimated that by continuing to fully fund the appropriation, the SIB will be reimbursing within 6-8 months in November of 2018 and should be reimbursing requests at 90 days of receipt of a request by 2019.