When things are expensive the person paying the bill tends to want to know everything about it, if nothing else to confirm that the costs are legitimate. \u00a0Understandable.<\/p>\n
One of the recurring questions that I would like to address now is: Can you put my business in a different class code?<\/strong> \u00a0This is a question that pops up typically because of costs. \u00a0The business owner sees the rate he’s paying, which is determined by the\u00a0class code his business is in, and thinks, “Surely there has to be a cheaper class code I can fit into.”<\/p>\n There most likely is a cheaper class code out there, but you most likely don’t fit into it. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because there are objective criteria that determine what a business’s classification is. \u00a0Your insurance agent cannot change it no matter how much he tries. \u00a0Let’s take a restaurant for example. \u00a0Restaurants fall into the 9079 class code and a typical rate in California right now is around 10%. \u00a0 Sandwich shops on the other hand are class code 8078 and their rate is somewhere around 6%. \u00a0That’s a 40% difference! \u00a0Easy to see why a restaurant would want to be a sandwich shop in this case. The problem is that to be a sandwich shop, you can\u00a0only have toasters and microwaves to heat your food and you can’t serve alcohol. \u00a0If you deep fry things and serve sake bombs, you’re going to be 9079, no matter how many sandwiches you serve.<\/p>\n Sometimes it’s a little more tricky, and your business doesn’t easily fit into a class code. \u00a0In this case, you are given a class code “by analogy.” \u00a0This happens with businesses that are new and\/or very unique and there isn’t a class code set up for it yet. \u00a0The\u00a0Worker Comp Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB) will step in and make the call. \u00a0They do this by determining the most similar class code based on what your employee’s physical work activities are. \u00a0For example, say you are a mobile horse grooming business that goes to shows and stables and washes horses’ tails on site. \u00a0Since there is no classification for mobile horse groomers because of its uniqueness and\/or newness, you will most likely be assigned by analogy into the horse stable class code 7207 – even though you don’t have a stable – because your employees do similar physical work as those in a horse stable.<\/p>\n It is true, there are situations where a business is misclassed either because of an error on part of the insurance agent or company, or the business has changed its operations. \u00a0When this happens, there are steps to correcting the error, and can be and easy or tedious process depending on a few factors. \u00a0Mistakes can always be fixed.<\/p>\n Outside of an error, however, class codes are pretty much set\u00a0in stone….. sorry!<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been working with workers comp since 2004\u00a0and although […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7,13],"tags":[2,18,14],"class_list":["post-2427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-insurance","category-liability-insurance","category-workers-compensation","tag-business-insurance","tag-liability-insurance","tag-workers-compensation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44623,"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427\/revisions\/44623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finfrockweb.com\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}