6 former railroad employees indicted in disability benefits fraud
Defendants face federal charges 2 minutes read (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)
Federal prosecutors allege that the six were working other jobs while providing false information to the U.S. Railroad Retirement Board’s (RRB) Disability Benefits Division.
The defendants will be arraigned in federal court in Chicago, the attorney’s office said.
They include Scott Carlberg, a former engineer at Soo Line Railroad; Ronald Lee Cribbs, a former employee at Chessie Seaboard Consolidated; Robie Vonderhaar, a former foreman for Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad; Richard W. Browner Jr., a former assistant line engineer at New Jersey Transit; James Bonner, a former engineer for BNSF (NYSE: BRK.B); and King Bradley Jr., a former conductor for Illinois Central Railroad.
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Insurers’ in-house and outside counsel should exercise care when writing all or part of a denial letter for a claim handler to sign and send, or counsel may unwittingly waive the company’s attorney-client privilege and find themselves subject to deposition. In
1 The court reasoned that the insured was entitled to depose the individual with personal knowledge of the reasons for the denial, but, at deposition, the claim handler testified she had not received any training on the applicable legal standards, and she could not explain the letter’s analysis of Mississippi law.
2 The court therefore concluded that because the claim handler did not have personal knowledge of the reasons for denial, the insured was entitled to depose the in-house attorney who prepared the letter and to review correspondence between the attorney and the claim handler regarding the claim.