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More Arrow-gate: Nightmare continues for some drivers

While some former drivers and employees of Arrow Trucking have found new jobs and are slowly recovering from their “Nightmare before Christmas,” some injured drivers who relied on their workers’ compensation checks for survival are finding themselves unable to work, low on cash, and on the brink of losing it all.

The Tulsa-based company went out of business unexpectedly on Dec. 22, 2009, leaving hundreds of drivers scattered all over the country without fuel after their cards had been shut off. Former driver Larry Cook said his “nightmare” started two months before Christmas, when he was hurt on the job. He was rammed in the head with a trailer that slipped while it was being stacked on his trailer.

Since that time, Cook has been relying on trucker assistance groups to help with his rent and other bills. He is also receiving government assistance from the state of Arizona.

In the days and weeks leading up to Arrow Trucking’s abrupt collapse, one former workers’ compensation adjuster reported that her phone was “ringing off the hook” with calls from both injured workers and their providers who said that the company’s checks to them were bouncing.

Up until the company’s shutdown, the claims employee, who didn’t want to be named, told Land Line her job was to ensure that injured workers received their time-off pay or light-duty pay. She also investigated workers compensation claims “for compensability and advised the company on how to handle claims.”

She said her job became “quite challenging” at the end when it was clear the company was in severe financial trouble.

“Up until October things were great, but then I started noticing things. I was told that these months were the hardest for trucking companies. I had never worked for a trucking company before, so I believed them when they said things would get better,” she said.

Her first hint that the company’s finances were unstable was back in October 2009, when her department had some court-ordered payments that were due. She said while her department was told to pay the orders, she found out later there weren’t funds in the account to cover them. She said that although she had access to the claims department payment registry, she never knew exactly how much money was in the account.

“Some of the orders were for more than $10,000 and those checks bounced. So then the attorneys for those cases said, ‘OK, I want all of my money due now,’ which we were told to pay – and then those checks were bouncing, too. That really put us in a bind because up until that point we were allowed to make payment arrangements. Then we had to pay everything in one lump sum. I think we made good on some, but not all, of them.”

Then, in November 2009, she said everything “went out from under our feet.”

“We were getting calls left and right every day that checks were bouncing,” she said. “Up until that point we were cutting checks from our own claims account. But in December I was told to start getting some payroll checks, which I did. And those started bouncing too.”

She said she had few answers for injured drivers who were desperately counting on those checks to feed their families as to why the checks were bouncing.

“I have never been through anything like this before, and I’ve been doing this type of work for years,” she said. “I felt so helpless and embarrassed because I knew a lot of these drivers depended on those checks. Then a day before we closed, I had like 10 calls right in a row from people who had their checks bounce. I had just heard from my bank that my check didn’t clear either. I told the claimants, ‘Hey, I am in the same boat as you are,’ so then they were comforting me.”

She estimates that there were probably around “80-plus open claims” at the time Arrow Trucking closed its doors.

At the same time that many injured drivers’ checks were bouncing, the former Arrow Trucking employee alleges that the two top executives at the company – Doug Pielsticker, former president and CEO, and Joe Mowry, the company’s former executive vice president – were receiving “good” checks from the claims department’s account.

“It didn’t make a lot of sense that we were getting calls from claimants that their checks were bouncing, but at the same time checks written from the same account to Doug and Joe would clear,” she said.

“Doug and Joe were having checks cut from the claims department to them, mostly without documentation,” she claims. “Sometimes Joe would have backup documentation on why he needed a check, but Doug never did. The amounts would vary – sometimes they would be for $4,100, sometimes for $1,400, but that added up.”

In a year’s time, she said that according to the payment registry, Pielsticker received more than $200,000 from the claims department, while Mowry received more than $100,000.

“When they were getting these checks, I thought, ‘You know, this is wrong, but this wasn’t my company,’” she said. “But we were being told by the higher-ups to do this.”

Every day up until the company’s collapse, she said the company’s procedure was to send an e-mail to Jonathan Moore, the company’s former chief financial officer, with a carbon copy to Mowry with a list and amount of work comp claims that had to be paid.

She said the maximum amount she was allowed to pay was around $10,000 at one time.

She said the company’s policy when drivers hired on with Arrow Trucking was that injured drivers had to come to Tulsa for treatment. She said the company then put them up in a hotel during their stay for treatment.

“On the day it closed, I called every one of the guys at the hotel and told them what was going on. Most of the others who were receiving treatment had gone home for Christmas, so there were only about six at the hotel. I called the ones who went home and told them I didn’t think they needed to come back.”

While she said she doesn’t remember being told by providers that they would only treat our patients on a cash-only basis, she does remember receiving several calls from providers who had received bad checks from Arrow Trucking.

“If a provider did not take Arrow work comp claims, they just didn’t treat the patients. That’s just the way it was,” she said. “Not that we didn’t owe everybody around and either didn’t pay the bill or it bounced, but there were always providers willing to see our employees,” she said.

She said at the time of Arrow Trucking’s closure, the state of Oklahoma had been pushing the company to up its bond requirement from $2.35 million to around $5 million to cover the company’s workers compensation claims if Arrow Trucking went under. She said she was hired to pay the claims in a timely manner in an effort to avoid having to pay this higher bond amount.

Even though she has secured a new job, she said she still feels bad for the ones who are unable to work or who haven’t been able to find work yet.

“Deep down I think I knew things were bad, but I didn’t want to believe it because I needed a job too,” she said. “Looking back now I believe we all suffered because some got greedier and greedier. It was never enough.”

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