Where we got something wrong, what it was, and what we changed

DATEWHAT WAS WRONG · WHAT IS CORRECT · WHY IT HAPPENED · HOW IT WAS CAUGHT

1. October 21, 2026 — Corrected

   twenty-seven English statements the Spanish translators questioned

   While re-translating the Spanish pages, the translators were asked to report anything in the English that looked legally wrong; they flagged 29 statements, and each was read against the statute, regulation, decision or agency rule it rests on. Two were right. The rest now say what the source says, on every page that repeated them: only a late utilization review decision goes to a judge — other defects go to Independent Medical Review (Dubon II); an expedited hearing needs an accepted injury and does not hear a medical-necessity dispute; workers’ compensation is generally not taxable, but the part that reduces Social Security disability can be; the 420-week limit on a death claim applies only to cancer, tuberculosis and blood-borne disease deaths under the public-safety presumptions; amputations get up to 240 weeks of temporary disability within five years of the injury; § 4850 pays up to a year of salary, and that year counts toward the 104 weeks; within 14 days the claims administrator owes the first payment or a written delay or denial notice, not a decision; a missed objection to a Declaration of Readiness waives only objections to proceeding on its issues; a defective MPN notice is a basis for treatment outside the network only where it led to a denial of care, and every employer, not only one with an MPN, must give the predesignation notice; a client employer shares a labor contractor’s coverage liability only for its regular, customary work; an uninsured employer must be formally served, not only in person; in a cumulative trauma claim the policy year turns on the injury date or the last day of exposure, whichever came first; the FMLA does not award emotional-distress or punitive damages; a needs-based VA pension counts workers’ compensation as income; the felony exclusion requires a conviction; the home-care look-back runs from the employer’s receipt of the prescription; the 15% return-to-work reduction applied only to employers of 50 or more; Social Security’s 80% test looks only at the year disability began and the five before it; and the one-year filing deadline runs from the injury, the last medical treatment or the last day a disability payment covered. Sources lines that belonged to other pages were replaced. Why it happened: sentences written as summaries dropped a condition the law attaches, and some were repeated from page to page. How it was caught: the Spanish re-translation of October 21.

2. October 21, 2026 — Corrected

   the claim-delay answer and the public-safety presumptions guide: the COVID-19 presumptions on the ordinary 90 days

   The answer “My claim is delayed” said a claim under the COVID-19 presumptions at §§ 3212.86–3212.88 “kept the ordinary 90-day period,” and the public-safety presumptions guide said its rejection deadline “stayed at the ordinary 90 days.” Each section set a shorter window of its own, 30 days or 45, and all three were repealed on January 1, 2024; both pages now say so, as do their Spanish and Korean translations, the Korean translations of the denied-claim guide and the deadline calculator (which this morning’s two corrections missed), and the Korean translation of the 75-day article, which still carried the sentence the English article dropped on October 20. Why it happened: the sentence was written once and repeated, and each correction fixed the page it was found on. How it was caught: a search of the whole site, in all three languages, for the sentence this morning’s corrections fixed; the site’s check of every cited authority now refuses a 90-day statement in any paragraph that cites these sections.

3. October 21, 2026 — Corrected

   the deadline calculator: the same sentence about the COVID-19 presumptions

   The calculator’s list of the clocks said the COVID-19 presumptions at §§ 3212.86–3212.88 “keep 90 days.” They had their own 30- and 45-day windows and were repealed on January 1, 2024; the line now says so. Why it happened: the line was written from the same sentence as the denied-claim guide’s. How it was caught: the same check, on the calculator’s Spanish translation, the same day.

4. October 21, 2026 — Corrected

   the denied-claim guide: the COVID-19 presumptions described as in force

   The guide said the COVID-19 presumptions at §§ 3212.86–3212.88 “keep the 90-day period.” They had their own 30- and 45-day windows, and all three were repealed on January 1, 2024 (AB 1751, Stats. 2022, ch. 758); the sentence now says so. Why it happened: the sentence was written about the 75-day rule and described the sections it leaves out in the present tense. How it was caught: the site’s check of every cited authority flagged the same sentence on the page’s Spanish translation.

5. October 20, 2026 — Corrected

   the six articles of September 5: what rebuilding them found wrong

   Each was rebuilt to the site’s article standard, and every claim was checked again against its primary source. Temporary disability rates: the limits do not rise every January 1 (they stood still in 2024, when the state average weekly wage fell); a worker who earns less than the minimum is paid the minimum, not that wage; two of the four ways the average weekly wage is figured were misdescribed; and the 2026 earnings ceiling is $2,646.16, not $2,646.17. The 75-day presumption: the penalty enacted with it is five times the benefits unreasonably delayed, capped at $50,000, not “up to” five times; the 2025 expansion to airport firefighters was described with more agencies and airports than the state’s summary supports; and the COVID-19 presumptions had their own 30- and 45-day windows, not the ordinary 90. The rotator cuff: apportioning a frozen shoulder caused by treatment is limited by a 2020 decision the page left out, and a rule about pain on a zero rating was quoted as though it were the AMA Guides’ own words. Mileage: an older claim does not always pay temporary disability at its injury year’s limits (a payment two or more years after the injury uses the limits in effect when it is paid), and the page’s test for a short mileage check could not work. SB 171: an illustrative example called two ratings’ sum “combining.” Why it happened: these six were written before the standard and were not re-read against the sources when it was adopted. How it was caught: the rebuild itself. Each article notes its correction.

6. October 16, 2026 — Corrected

   this page: three things it said it did, and did not

   The log said it ran in reverse date order, and the September 5 entry sat below August 23. “How to tell us” asked you to write to the firm’s monitored mailbox and never named it: the address, mail@solovteitellapc.com, was lost when this page was moved into the site’s own templates. And the privacy policy and the terms of use say their material changes are logged here, and none were. Each is fixed — the log runs newest first, the address is named, and the policies’ changes are dated under “Changes to our policies,” below. Caught by reading this page line by line when it was redesigned.

7. October 5, 2026 — Corrected

   114 sentences checked against the source each one cites; 76 had a statement of law wrong

   Each was read the same day against the primary source the sentence cites — the code section, the regulation, the en banc decision, the agency’s own notice — not from memory and not from another page. 76 corrected a statement of law, 22 were editorial, 13 were right as written, and 3 could not be verified against a primary source and stand unchanged. Every correction landed in English, Spanish and Korean together. Three of the 76: several pages said that any procedural defect in a utilization review decision sends the dispute to a judge, when the WCAB’s en banc decision in Dubon II (2014) holds that only an untimely decision does — every other defect goes to independent medical review; a page said your employer controls your treatment for the first 30 days and only then may you change doctors, a rule that applies only where there is no medical provider network — inside one, you may change after the first visit; and 32 pages dated the veto of AB 1336, the farmworker heat presumption, to October 15, 2025, when it was October 13. Why: most were a paraphrase that had drifted from the source it cites — a dropped word, the wrong subdivision, a rule for one situation stated as if it held for every situation. Caught by the people translating these pages into Korean and writing new ones, each reading the statute, regulation or agency page a sentence cites.

8. September 5, 2026 — Corrected

   Los Angeles County: “four” district offices, and the table under it listed five

   Five is correct — Los Angeles, Van Nuys, Marina del Rey, Long Beach, and Pomona — and that is what the county pages now say in both languages. Two more the same day: an “Implementation notes” section written for the build team was shipping as page content, and a homepage contact card said a person calls back “usually the same day” when the contact page promises one business day and nothing faster. Caught by rebuilding the three homepages side by side, which put each language’s facts next to the others’.

9. August 23, 2026 — Corrected

   Labor Code § 5909 was stated backwards across the English site

   At the time, every English page said § 5909’s 60 days runs “from the date of filing,” and that the AB 171 transmittal trigger “reverted” on July 1, 2026. The rule is the opposite. SB 171 (Stats. 2026, ch. 83), chaptered July 13, 2026, deleted AB 171’s sunset and repealed the filing-trigger version outright — the transmittal trigger is operative and permanent, and that is what every page on this site now says. Why: we tracked the sunset and not the statute. A sunset date is a prediction about what the Legislature will not do; we treated it as a fact about what the law says. Compounding it, we had already identified SB 171 as the bill that rewrote SIBTF — the same bill, on our own site — and did not read the rest of it. Caught by a re-read of the chaptered bill text rather than of our own calendar. One thing we are not claiming to have resolved: SB 171 was chaptered twelve days after the July 1 sunset date, and which trigger governed a petition acted on inside that window is a real question. Anyone whose petition was pending in early July 2026 should have the specific dates looked at.

10. August 20, 2026 — Corrected

    three citations checked against primary sources; two were wrong

    8 CCR § 10744, not § 10742, is the objection rule — § 10742 governs filing a Declaration of Readiness; § 10744 carries the ten days and the waiver. And § 4610.6(j), not (i), is the five-working-day authorization clock — (i) is the remand provision. A third: § 4662(a)(3) says “practically total paralysis,” full stop; one Spanish page had narrowed it to a spine injury with complete paralysis of the legs. The English pages were right in every case — the defect was in translation. Caught by a cross-language consistency gate.

11. August 20, 2026 — Corrected

    twenty-six pages carried a line written for a batch, not a reader

    Content is authored ten pages to a file, so a shared reviewer line and source list rendered on whichever page sat last. The amputation page told readers “All four pages reviewed by…”; the Spanish warehouse page carried a nail-salon OSHA link and an AMA Guides disclaimer belonging to a different page. Twenty-six pages fixed. Every existing gate passed — it was only wrong to a reader, which is a category of defect a link checker cannot see. Caught by an agent that refused to reproduce a nail-salon citation on a warehouse page.

12. August 20, 2026 — Corrected

    the IMR deadlines verified verbatim; a 75-day gap closed in the tools

    § 4610.5(h)(1) and (h)(3) verified verbatim; § 5402 and § 4650 verified. But § 5402(b) surfaced a gap: the presumption attaches at 90 days except for the public safety presumptions, where it is 75. The deep pages had this right; both deadline calculators and the “my claim is delayed” page did not — the page a person whose claim has been sitting actually lands on. A firefighter with a cancer claim was being given the wrong number on the page most likely to be read by exactly that person. The lesson: check where the reader actually lands, not where the rule is best explained.

13. August 20, 2026 — Improved

    four more provisions verified; two pages improved

    § 4656(c)(3), § 4604.5(c)(1), § 4600(h), § 4600(e) and (g) all correct as published. Two improved anyway: § 4604.5(c)(2)(A) also lets the employer authorize additional visits in writing, and nobody volunteers that — the page now says to ask. And § 4600(h) keys on the employer’s receipt of the home-care prescription, not the date it was written; a prescription written on the 1st and mailed on the 20th protects only from the 6th. A provision can be stated accurately and still leave the reader without the thing they could actually do about it.

14. August 19, 2026 — Corrected

    MTUS guideline changes: we undercounted, and missed a category entirely

    We said two MTUS guidelines were replaced January 2, 2026. Four were — Shoulder (§ 9792.23.2), Elbow (§ 9792.23.3), Hand/Wrist/Forearm (§ 9792.23.4), and Traumatic Brain Injury (§ 9792.24.5, which sits under Special Topics, so anyone searching the 9792.23 series will not find it). And we had missed the year’s most consequential MTUS change entirely: the April 1, 2026 amendment adding a PTSD and Acute Stress Disorder module to the Workplace Mental Health Guideline. A guideline is what a utilization reviewer measures a request against. Why: the page was written from the changes most relevant to what we had already drafted. Relevance to what we had already written is not a research method.

15. August 19, 2026 — Corrected

    Temporary disability, pre-launch

    Our prior-year table was shifted one year early from 2023 backward. 2023 was $242.86 / $1,619.15 and 2022 was $230.95 / $1,539.71. Why: we assumed the rates rise every January. They did not in 2024 — the State Average Weekly Wage fell from $1,651 to $1,642, so no adjustment was triggered. One flat year silently shifts every row below it. The benefits calculator was affected too. Every figure now reads from a single canonical rate record with its source attached rather than being restated page by page. That structural change is the real fix; this correction is only the symptom.

16. August 19, 2026 — Verified

    utilization review and mileage verified against primary sources

    The April 1, 2026 UR restructure confirmed from the regulation text; § 9792.9.8(b)(3) checks out verbatim. Both 2026 mileage rates confirmed against DWC Newslines — 72.5¢ from January 1 and 76¢ from July 1 — and DWC states expressly that the rate applies to travel on or after the effective date regardless of when the injury occurred, which is why every calculator here asks for a date of travel rather than a year. No corrections required.

17. August 19, 2026 — Verified

    SIBTF gap opened and closed the same day

    Two claims flagged as stated with full confidence but unverified were checked against the enacted text of SB 171. Both correct: thresholds measured without the 1.4 factor, and multiple body parts combined rather than added. One thing we got wrong in our own flag — we described the page as covering only the 35% and 70% thresholds when it already covered the 5% opposite-member gateway. A verification note that misdescribes the page it is attached to is its own small defect.

18. August 19, 2026 — Verified

    all thirteen WCAB office addresses verified

    All thirteen matched the DWC directory. No corrections required. We are logging a pass, because this site tells readers its office pages are re-verified quarterly, and a promise nobody ever reports on is not a promise. One change: the Anaheim hedge is replaced with the verified 1065 N. Link, Suite 170, with a note that directories still showing Pacificenter Drive or Suite 160 are stale. Next scheduled check: November 2026.

19. August 19, 2026 — Verified

    two open findings verified; one of them did not hold

    Item 2 held: the § 4658(d)(1) bands confirmed verbatim — 50% = 271.25 weeks, 70% = 433.25, 75% = 513.25, 99.75% = 909.25 — with the trap that subdivision (a)’s own illustration shows 15% = 50.25 weeks because it belongs to the pre-1992 schedule. Item 1 did not hold; see the August 23 entry. The entry stays here with what we got wrong marked on it, because a verification log that quietly deletes its bad calls is not a verification log.