The hurt workers wait on benches at the Queens office of the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board.
People like Hopeton Watkis, 64, a laborer, who lost two teeth when he fell and hit a wheelbarrow.
Or Rajcoomar Jagan, 50, a construction worker, who injured a leg falling off a scaffold.
Or Vicki Marquez, 32, a retail sales associate, who hurt her elbow hauling clothes.
They come to the board seeking authorization for medical treatment and replacement wages — in short, a quick and fair resolution from a system set up to replace fractious court fights between employers and employees.
What they find instead is a subbasement of the legal world, a $5.5 billion-a-year state-run bureaucracy that, an examination by The New York Times found, struggles to treat workers with due speed, protect employers from fraud or mute tensions in the workplace.
These struggles are particularly evident each day in Queens, the state’s busiest hearing office, where The Times spent 18 months attending hearings, reviewing cases and interviewing participants, virtually none of whom defended the system as efficient.
At some hearings, as judges looked on, lawyers chatted on cellphones, cracked bawdy jokes or read newspapers during testimony. Expert witnesses seemed biased to the point of caricature. Claims dragged on, but hearings seldom exceeded a few blurred minutes, rarely proved conclusive and were conducted in baffling shorthand.
Mr. Watkis waited two years to get his front teeth fixed. Ms. Marquez had to postpone elbow surgery for a year until the board allowed it. Mr. Jagan exhausted three years trying to get compensated, only to be denied all benefits, a decision that stunned even some insurance company lawyers.
“Comparing Supreme Court, say, to this is like comparing a hospital to a MASH unit,” said Anthony Pizza, a lawyer for insurance companies. “A lot of it is meatball justice.”
Workers’ compensation systems across the country are troubled, and reform efforts are under way here. But New York, a pioneer of the concept and home to the nation’s second-largest system, has some signature claims to dysfunction and is widely recognized as the most adversarial.
Though its commissioners largely function as a legal tribunal, most are not lawyers but relatives or allies of politicians, appointed usually without regard to experience in the field.
Though many cases turn on medical evaluations, the board has not had its own medical director for nearly a decade. Decisions are often driven by the opinions of doctors certified by the state as so-called independent medical examiners. Yet claimant lawyers and treating doctors say these examiners often understate workers’ ailments to win business from the insurers who pay them.
Fines for infractions are usually small, and some insurers ignore paying them for years without consequence. A few months ago, New York City agreed to produce $1.1 million in penalties, some years overdue.
Workers are known to fabricate claims, while employers can be equally uninhibited about pressuring injured workers against filing for compensation, or punishing them if they do.
And everywhere the system tolerates delays that can make the injured wait months or years for money and care. Statewide, in about one in six cases, insurers dispute that injuries are real or were suffered on the job. Until recently, these cases had averaged nearly nine months to resolve. And many of them remain unresolved years later.
Even unchallenged cases plod on. A.I.G., the insurance company, said a review of its 2007 New York cases found that those involving missed work took on average 802 days to reach a final stage, 30 percent longer than in the rest of the country.
A recent task force study found that when insurers reject a medical procedure, say, an operation, it takes more than three or four months for the board to settle the dispute. The delay can mean that injuries heal slowly or improperly, and in 75 percent of those cases, the worker’s need for the procedure is upheld.
Zachary S. Weiss, the chairman of the compensation board since late 2007, said that given the scope of what needs to be done, change must be incremental.
“There are millions of things I would like to correct and I’d like to correct them all immediately, and I can’t,” Mr. Weiss said.
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