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I have an account who travels through 6 states delivering goods. The company they are with now can't add on 3 of the states to the current WC policy. Do they have to purchase individual policies for each state?

If their employees are domiciled in one state (ex: California), but travel elsewhere, then the policy should be for California only, with an "All States" endorsement attached.

If, however, they have employees that are domiciled in different states (ex: California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona), then you'll need to find a carrier that writes in each state. The carrier may be able to write one policy that covers each state, or separate policies for each.

The key is which state to the employees reside in. If just one state, then there's no need for separate policies for each state they may travel through.

Time for a national carrier, or at least a super regional.

Free advice - if one of your accounts is going into growth mode it's a good idea to get them with a national carrier so you don' t run into this problem when they tell you that they started operations in a state that AAA Mutual can't write in. Oh yeah, they started operations there two months ago and the state is talking about fines if they can't show certs right now & they also need certs to get paid on that big contract.

Thanks Big Dog and Kevin. The employees are domiciled in the state where we started the policy but New York has new WC laws starting 9/19/07. The carrier can't put New York on section 3A of the policy so we are out of luck.

Kevin, we went through NCCI for this policy. Can you give me some names of National Carriers that I could contact that would take this account?

Big Dog- what do you guys do when they are in fact only domiciled in the one state, from which they purchase the insurance, but they are in the state assigned risk which won't offer "other states" coverage?

Coverage normally (except for New York, which is never normal) applies to the state of domicile.

If you, as an employee of an insurance agency, travel out of state to visit a location of one of your clients, do you have to purchase W/C coverage for that state? No (unless it's New York...). If you work for, and are domiciled in California, and travel to Nevada to visit a client, and are injured, your agency's policy still covers you. You don't need to add coverage for Nevada as you don't live/work there normally.

You might just have answered my question - my agency is in NJ so 99% of our customers' out of state exposures are in fact, New York, so I guess I kind of thought that the same thing would apply to work in any state.

For example I thought that, say a trucker, whose employees may live and be hired in NJ, should get injured in say, Pennsylvania. Cannot the truck driver then file for PA benefits? A NJ A/R Plan policy does not provide anything but NJ benefits....

Granted, NJ and NY benefits might be higher than that of other states, making this a moot point, but I wasn't planning on researching the statutory benefit levels of all 50 states