A 28-year firefighter's hearing loss claim leaves his county employer on the hook
Government employers cannot use partial disability retirement benefits to cancel out workers' compensation awards, a Maryland court ruled on March 2.
The decision, handed down by the Appellate Court of Maryland, draws a line that public sector HR and benefits teams cannot afford to ignore: the type of disability benefit an employer pays matters – and the difference can cost the organization money it thought it had already covered.
The case began with Joseph Dennie, a Montgomery County firefighter who spent twenty-eight years on the job. While still working through the process of retiring, he filed a workers' compensation claim in April 2018 for occupational hearing loss – a condition that developed over his career but only surfaced toward the end of his service. He was formally granted a service-connected partial disability retirement in June of that year. His retirement benefit was tied to a specific list of conditions – orthopedic injuries, hypertension, sleep apnea, among others – that his employer formally documented as the basis for his retirement.
The Maryland Workers' Compensation Commission sided with Dennie on the hearing loss claim, awarding him just over $4,700 in permanent partial disability benefits.
Montgomery County then tried to offset that award against the retirement benefits it was already paying Dennie, arguing that it should not have to pay twice. The strategy worked at first – a circuit court agreed with the county and zeroed out its workers' compensation liability entirely.
Dennie appealed, and on March 2, 2026, the appellate court came down firmly on his side.
The court's reasoning is straightforward and instructive. Maryland law allows a government employer to offset workers' compensation payments against other benefits it is paying – but only when both sets of payments cover the same injury. The key question was whether Dennie's retirement benefit covered his hearing loss. It did not. His partial disability retirement was granted for a defined, enumerated list of conditions, and hearing loss was not among them. There was no overlap, no double payment, and therefore no valid basis for the offset.
The court contrasted this with an earlier case involving a fellow Montgomery County firefighter who had retired on a total disability benefit – a broader benefit that covers all work-related injuries and diseases, including those that emerge after retirement. In that case, the offset was allowed, because the retirement benefit effectively covered everything, including the hearing loss at issue. The distinction is stark: total disability, broad coverage, offset allowed. Partial disability, condition-specific coverage, offset denied.
The ruling also addressed a 2023 update to Maryland's offset law, which Dennie had argued should apply to his case. The court rejected that argument, holding that the law in effect at the time a worker's disability begins is the law that governs – not a later amendment. Since Dennie's date of disablement for his hearing loss fell in 2018, the pre-2023 version of the law applied.
For HR professionals in government and public sector organizations, the practical message is direct. Partial disability retirement programs, by their nature, are built around specific, documented conditions. That specificity – while administratively tidy – limits the employer's ability to use those benefits as a shield against separate workers' compensation claims arising from different conditions. If an employee develops an occupational illness that falls outside the scope of an existing retirement benefit, the employer remains on the hook.
The case is a reminder that disability benefit structures are not just administrative paperwork. The way a benefit program is designed and documented determines what it covers – and what it does not. For HR and benefits teams managing complex disability portfolios, particularly in high-risk environments like emergency services or public safety, that distinction carries real financial consequences.
