An injured worker went unpaid for years while his file sat unread
California's top court just told the state's workers' comp board it can't stop its own clock - and injured workers' awards hang on it.
On August 24, 2026, the California Supreme Court ruled that the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board cannot stretch the 60-day deadline it has to act on a petition for reconsideration, even when the paperwork reaches it late.
The dispute began with a sanitation district worker awarded total and permanent disability after a December 2013 injury. His employer filed a petition for reconsideration on March 23, 2023, well within the window. Under the version of Labor Code section 5909 then in force, the board had 60 days to act, or the petition would be "deemed to have been denied."
The board sat on it for 144 days. It said it never got notice of the petition until June 15, 2023 - after the deadline had passed - because of an administrative irregularity that was neither party's fault. When it finally granted reconsideration, it argued it could "toll," or pause, its own deadline until the file actually landed on its desk.
The court rejected that. The justice wrote that the deadline is mandatory and that the board "may not equitably toll its own deadline to act." Tolling exists to help litigants who miss a filing deadline, the court said - not to excuse an agency's own delay. The board is neither a party nor a litigant, and section 5909 is not a statute of limitations.
There was one caveat. The court held the deadline is not jurisdictional in the strictest sense and left a narrow opening: a party whose petition is ignored past 60 days might raise a due process claim. But that argument belongs to the affected party - here the employer - not to the board acting on its own behalf.
The court noted the board had routinely used a due process workaround to cover a recurring failure to receive petitions on time.
The mechanics matter for employers and comp administrators. Once 60 days pass with no board action, the petition is denied by operation of law, and the 45-day window to seek review in the Court of Appeal begins to run. Waiting on the board can burn that window.
The worker's award dated to March 2023, and his counsel told the court he had been paid nothing since - even though the employer's own deadline to seek review had expired on July 6, 2023.
The Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeal, which had rescinded the board's late order.
