A few months ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York called me and said, ‘I’m hurt.’
I pushed a blonde out of my lap and said, ‘What happened?’
‘I was threading the pins on the bucket to Old Bessie and it slipped.’
Old Bessie is what he calls the backhoe. ‘Pin’ is a misnomer. The pins are the fasteners that hold the bucket onto the arm. They are as thick as the fat part of my thumb. The bucket is too heavy for one guy to lift off the ground alone.
‘The loader bucket or the excavator bucket’, I asked, trying to sound informed.
‘I don’t like doctors.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I sliced open my hand.’
‘Go to the doctor.’
‘I don’t have insurance.’
‘Go to the fucking doctor. I will pay for it.’
The blonde couldn’t help but overhear what had happened. She told me to call my workers’ comp carrier. They would take care of it. She also told me that Wisconsin was the first state to pass a workers’ comp statute in 1911, and that by 1948 all other states had followed suit. Workers’ comp was the first form of no-fault insurance. When it was instituted – she said – opponents said that it would create perverse incentives because of moral hazard, but it has not turned out that way.
‘We should expand workers’ comp’, I said.
She said, ‘Uh-huh’.
‘Like, single-payer medicare for all, the same as in every other developed country’.
She looked at me pityingly and said, ‘You’re lucky I need jar-tops loosened’.
‘Are you really blonde?’
‘I’m Asian, shitass.’
While Mike was on the way to the hospital, I called my Workers Comp carrier. They gave me a case number. I told him to give that to the people at the hospital when he got there. He told me that, when he spoke to the people at billing, he told them that the injury had occurred at work. They contacted me once, to confirm that his claim was not a scam. That took care of payment.
A few days later, I asked him how his thumb was. He said, ‘I hope your premium doesn’t go up.’
‘I don’t think it works like that’, I said. ‘It is based on hours worked, rather than claims filed. That’s because it is a no-fault system. Did you know that Wisconsin was the first state to institute workers’ comp? Hard to imagine it was once a deep blue state. Everyone else followed by 1948. You’d think we would learn, and expand the system to include the whole population and all medical conditions, not just job-related injuries.’
Mike’s attention began to waver. It often does that when I discuss blue-state politics with him.
‘Have you seen Trevor lately’, I asked.
Trevor is the guy who lives in the stick-built house on the property. When he hunts for deer on the land out back, he gives me a cut. Mike had told me that he and his old lady, who rents the house, were having troubles.
‘I haven’t seen his truck for a while, Mike said.
‘Well, tell him to get it together. I want my venison’.
‘You should have heard him yelling at her last week.’
‘How’s your hand?’
‘Like new.’
.
Workers comp insurance is a blessing to use. It is nothing like regular health insurance. You get injured, you see a doctor. You see a doctor, you heal. No push-back, no billing, no opaque pricing for services, no bullshit.
The bullshit happens on the front end.
I have written previously about audits from my workers’ comp carrier, the New York State Insurance Fund. Once a year, they perform a colonoscopy on my financial statement. The first year, the procedure was done in person by an extraordinarily attractive young woman who I still remember. Since then, it has been conducted remotely by guys who present as North Korean Traffic Cop.
My entities use the calendar year as a tax year. Since I don’t have partners or investors there is no need for a financial accounting year, but to the extent that I run budgets and do P&L reports, I use the calendar year for them. Some of the municipalities to which I pay school and local taxes use a 6/1 fiscal year.
The New York State Insurance Fund uses a 7/8 audit year for me. That doesn’t map onto any other reporting period. And they don’t even go from, say, 7/8/2022 through 7/7 2023. Nope. They go from 7/8/2022 through 7/8/2023. They use a three hundred sixty-six day fiscal year.[1]
Annual audits are a pain in the ass, but I have gotten used to them. I have learned how to download the requisite forms from my payroll provider and from the state tax authority website. I have learned how to upload shit on the NYSIF website. Bending over has become muscle memory. The leopards have broken into the sacred grove, drunk the holy water, and become part of the ritual.
Until last year, I blew off audits until well into the year after the year under audit. Shortly after I wrote my first blog post on this issue, I received a new audit notice from a guy who wrote emails like a ready-mix grinds cement. I emailed him back smugly and said, ‘I believe that that audit has concluded’. Before my email had time to reach his computer, he had sent me back a message saying, ‘That was for the 7/8/2020-7/8/2021 year. This is for the 7/8/2021-7/8/2022 year.’ I contemplated asking him whether the calendar had 366 days in North Korea, then said fuck it, wrapped my hands and pounded on the heavy bag for the rest of the afternoon.
This year, I learned my lesson. As soon as all applicable quarterly reports were in, I uploaded them to the NYSIF website. After a few email exchanges, I received a document signed by the auditor that said, ‘This is a copy of the audit completed by David Ronald on 8/21/2023 for the audit period 07/08/2022-07/08/2023’. I looked at the word completed and felt all gooey inside.
Late last week, I received an email from another auditor from the NYSIF that read, DEAR CUSTOMER: This is to notify you that a copy of audit appointment letter attached. Please open the attachment and review the information. Sincerely, Premium Audit Department New York State Insurance Fund PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. I opened the attachment to find a letter stating that an in-person payroll verification, also known as an audit, had been scheduled for the applicable policy, for January 10,2024. I was to ensure that an authorized individual was to be present to provide records, answer questions, review findings, and sign off on the payroll verification on the audit date.
I re-read the letter, checked the policy number and the audit year. I rooted around in my files, found a PDF of the audit completion notice dated 8/21/2023 for the 7/8/2022-7/8/2023 audit year and sent it to the new auditor with a note to the effect that that audit year was closed.
Early Monday morning, my phone farted. An email from the new auditor fell out, asking when she could speak with me by phone. The next thing I remember, my wife was shaking me and my extremities were blue. As the day went on, I swore that I would not give the auditor the convenience of a phone call. At about 9:30, I said fuck it and dialed the auditor’s number. When she picked up, she had a heavy Mainlander accent.
‘This audit is closed’, I said. ‘I sent you a copy of the sign-off letter that I got from your office in August.’
‘We conducted the audit this year –‘
‘That audit is closed. What’s the issue?’
‘Some of our staff has left, the audit was not conducted properly, and we have some further questions.’
You could hear my teeth grinding in Poughkeepsie.
‘We have a question about the entity Salon Management –‘
‘Solon.’
The auditor seemed to be struggling with what was not her native language. ‘Excuse me?’, she said.
‘Solon Management, LLC’.
‘Some of the payments to Mike, uh, Krekka are 1099 payments and some are W-2 payments?’
‘True.’
‘We don’t know which are which.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘Can you upload the general ledger for Salon Management to the NYSIF portal?’
I thought, They bugger their process and dump the mess on their clients. ‘What if I am unable to do that?’, I asked.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I might be unable to pull up the general ledger for the applicable entity for the applicable time period. We shred records after a period of time. The audit is, as you know, complete.’
‘I will have to ask my manager about that.’
‘Please do.’
Around noon, I downloaded the general ledger from Rent Manager and emailed it to the auditor. She emailed back, asking me which payments to Mike Krekka that were recorded on the general ledger were 1099 payments. I replied at the end of the day, telling her that that was all the information I had and that reporting was complicated by the fact that 1099 payments are reported using a calendar-year reporting period but NYSIF payroll is reported on a 7/8 annual reporting period. I wished her luck and sent her best regards.
I have not heard from her since. I don’t know whether that is the end of the 7/8/2022-7/8/2023 reporting period audit. I certainly hope that it is.
I understand that Tom Lehrer is still alive. He lives in California and hangs out around UCSC, where he taught math for some time. He stopped publishing songs when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because, he said, that was the death of political satire. With luck, he can be coaxed out of retirement like Leonard Cohen or Muhammed Ali. If he did that, the business practices of the New York State Insurance Fund would be fertile ground for him.
[1] I have not raised with them the issue of whether their charging me premia for two 366 fiscal years within a single 731 two-year period (or three 366 fiscal years within a single 1,097 year period) constitutes double counting for the day or days of overlap. I don’t have the stamina to explain it to them.