A letter arrives telling you to appear for an independent medical examination. One appointment, usually brief, with a doctor you have never met and will not see again. The report that comes out of it can decide your degree of disability, whether you are found to be at maximum medical improvement, and what a permanent injury is ultimately worth.
Most injured workers go to that appointment without knowing they have any rights at it. In New York they have several, and two of them are unusually strong.
What an IME is, and who chooses the doctor
An independent medical examination is an examination by a doctor who is not treating you, obtained by a party to your claim to get a medical opinion into the record. Under the Workers’ Compensation Law the employer, the carrier and you are each entitled to have you examined. It is not only a carrier tool, and that is worth knowing — more on it below.
The examiner has to be authorized by the Workers’ Compensation Board, and the companies that arrange these exams have to register with the Board separately and pay a fee. Registration is not an endorsement, and the Board says so in the regulation itself.
The Board does not pick the carrier’s examiner. It authorizes who may perform these exams; the party requesting the exam chooses from that pool. This is the point most often misunderstood. There is a separate kind of exam — an impartial specialist designated by the Board itself — but that is a different process and it is not what the carrier is sending you to.
Your rights at the examination
- You may bring someone with you — the rule says individuals of your own choosing, and does not limit who they are.
- You may record the examination. The examiner may not refuse to go ahead because you intend to record.
- Neither side may disrupt or interfere with the exam. That is the limit on both rights above.
the same day
You may record it, and the examiner cannot refuse to see you for that reason
This is the right almost nobody knows about. The regulation says plainly that you or the examiner may videotape or otherwise record the examination, and that an examiner who you have appeared in front of as scheduled may not refuse to conduct the exam because you intend to record it. The Board issued guidance saying the same thing.
If the carrier has been paying you voluntarily, before any award by a judge, it can act on an IME report without a hearing. See the carrier cut my checks after an IME: can it do that without a hearing?
Two limits. The recording cannot be used to disrupt or interfere with the examination, and recordings are not to be altered or distributed beyond Board proceedings. It also runs both ways — the examiner may record you as well.
A recording is often the only way to show the difference between a three-minute examination and a report describing a thorough one.
You may bring someone with you
The regulation entitles you to be accompanied by a person, or people, of your own choosing. There is no requirement that it be a relative, and no requirement that you explain who they are.
Be clear on what that does and does not mean. The regulation gives your companion the right to be present. It says nothing giving them a role in the examination, and it does say that neither you nor the examiner may disrupt or interfere with it. In practice, somebody who answers for you or argues with the examiner does your claim no favors.
You are entitled to notice — seven business days
You must receive notice of a scheduled examination at least seven business days beforehand, on the Board’s prescribed form, and a copy has to go to the Board the same day it is sent to you. Business days, not calendar days. There are separate and longer requirements for how far in advance the notice has to be sent — twelve business days if posted by ordinary mail, eight by overnight delivery — which is why a notice that looks timely on its face can still be defective.
It has to be somewhere reasonable, and your travel is reimbursed
The examination has to be in a facility suited to it, in a convenient and accessible location within a reasonable distance of where you live, and conducted with regard for your privacy and dignity. It should be during ordinary business hours unless you agree otherwise. There is no fixed mileage limit in the law — the test is reasonableness — so a long trip is something to raise rather than something automatically improper.
Where the carrier or employer requested the exam, you are entitled to be reimbursed for your travel to and from it. That is claimed on Board Form C-257, which goes to the carrier and to the Board.
An IME may be conducted by video only if every party consents, and never where the examiner is opining on permanent impairment — see telehealth in a workers’ comp claim.
The report
The examiner has ten business days after the examination to file the report, or twenty if you were examined outside New York.
You are entitled to a copy on the same day, and in the same manner, as everyone else. The statute lists the Board, the insurance carrier, your treating doctor, your representative and you. The carrier is not entitled to see it first while you wait.
The regulations also control how the report is produced. The examiner is solely responsible for its content. It may not be assembled by ticking boxes on a form somebody else prepared. The company that arranged the exam may not push the examiner toward a report differing substantially from their professional opinion, and materially altering a report exposes that company to revocation of its registration and a penalty of up to $10,000. The signature has to be a real one, not a stamp.
A report that does not substantially comply with those requirements is not admissible as evidence. There is an important qualification: you have to object in time. In Matter of Figueroa v Sing Sing Correctional Facility, decided by the Appellate Division in April 2026, a report was allowed to stand where the objection came roughly seven months after it was filed — the court holding both that the objection was untimely and that the report had substantially complied. Defects in an IME report are not self-executing and they can be waived by silence. If something is wrong with the report, it has to be raised promptly.
Waiver is tightly controlled. No agreement between you and an employer or carrier binds the Board or excuses compliance with these rules. The narrow exception is a waiver the law or a Workers’ Compensation Law Judge expressly authorizes and that you knowingly sign — which is a good reason to read anything you are handed to sign at one of these appointments, and to ask before signing it.
What happens if you do not go
Do not simply skip it. The law bars recovery of compensation for any period during which you have refused to submit to an examination, and where the Board itself ordered the exam, proceedings can be suspended outright.
But the opposite belief is just as wrong, and more common: missing one appointment does not, by itself, switch your benefits off. Where the Board has directed payments, the carrier generally has to ask the Board to stop them. It files a notice of intention to suspend or reduce, with supporting evidence, serves it on you and your representative, and the Board decides whether a suspension is justified. There are a few narrow situations in which a carrier may stop payments first and document it at the same time — a return to work is the common one — but failing to appear at an IME is not among them.
The carrier’s own form puts the standard as failure to appear “without good cause or sufficient excuse.” The statutory word is refused, and missed is not the same thing as refused. If you cannot make an appointment, say so in advance and in writing, and keep a copy — that single step is usually what turns what looks like a refusal into a rescheduling.
One more protection worth knowing: your physical capability of presenting yourself for the examination, and the examiner’s observations about how you managed it — walking in from the parking lot, climbing the steps — do not constitute dispositive evidence of what you can and cannot do.
How much weight the IME opinion carries
There is no rule in New York that your treating doctor outranks the IME, and none that the IME outranks your doctor. Where medical opinions conflict, the Board has the authority to resolve them and to draw reasonable inferences from the record. Any page telling you your own physician is presumed correct is telling you something that is not the law.
What the Board may not do is reject uncontroverted medical testimony altogether and substitute an opinion of its own. In Matter of Murphy v New York State Courts, the Third Department reversed the Board in 2022 for doing exactly that — and the opinion it improperly rejected was the independent medical examiner’s, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that these exams only ever cut one way.
In practice, the way a questionable IME opinion is met is with evidence: your treating physician’s findings, the medical records, and testimony. Medical experts can be deposed and cross-examined in Board proceedings, and the courts have held that a claimant may cross-examine the carrier’s examiner even without putting in a competing medical report, so long as the request is made in time at the hearing. That is the mechanism. It only works if somebody invokes it, and invoking it late is how it is usually lost.
The IME and your permanency finding
The exam that matters most is usually the one addressing permanency, because it sets the percentage that drives the award.
That evaluation should not happen until you have reached maximum medical improvement, and continuing to need palliative or symptomatic treatment does not by itself mean you are not at MMI. MMI is primarily a medical question rather than a calendar one, but there is one timing rule worth knowing. Under the Board’s 2018 guidelines, in schedule loss of use cases that do not involve surgery or a fracture, maximum medical improvement cannot be determined before six months from the date of injury or disablement unless the parties agree otherwise. Where there was surgery, a year from the injury or the last surgery is a common benchmark rather than a rule.
Which impairment guidelines apply is decided by the date of the first permanency evaluation rather than the date of your accident. Evaluations on or after 1 January 2018 are made under the 2018 guidelines. An examiner who applies the wrong edition has produced a challengeable opinion, and this cuts in both directions — in Matter of Garofalo v Verizon New York, decided in May 2024, the Board was reversed because the claimant’s own treating physician had used the superseded 2012 guidelines.
And the point worth repeating from the top of this page: the law entitles you, as well as the employer and the carrier, to have you examined. Where the question is a schedule loss of use percentage, your side is not limited to responding to the carrier’s number. Who pays for an examination you obtain depends on the circumstances, and in many cases it is the claimant, so it is a decision to make with your representative before the appointment is booked.
Where two accidents are involved, the IME will often go further and try to divide the impairment between them. Our post on apportionment between two workers’ compensation claims explains when that split matters to you and when it only decides which carrier pays.
If something went wrong at your exam
An examination that lasted two minutes and produced a report describing a full physical is not something you simply have to accept. Nor is a report recording a history you never gave.
The Board’s Office of the Advocate for Injured Workers takes complaints from injured workers, at 877.632.4996 or advinjwkr@wcb.ny.gov. Questions about whether a particular examiner or IME company is authorized go to the Board’s Medical Director’s Office at 800.781.2362. The Board publishes the lists of examiners and IME entities whose authorization or registration has been revoked, or who have been removed from its authorized lists. Tell your representative either way — the more useful step is usually raising the problem inside your case, not only with the Board.
There is also a rule about what an examiner is allowed to be given. Material provided to an IME examiner has to be in the Board file and available to everyone at the time it is provided. Records or instructions fed to an examiner outside that process are a basis to object: the Board has treated undisclosed communications with an examiner as going to the weight and credibility of the opinion, and a serious enough violation can support an application to preclude the report.
Going to an IME: what actually helps
- Bring somebody with you, and decide beforehand whether you are going to record. Both are yours as of right, so long as you appear as scheduled and neither is used to disrupt the examination.
- Describe your day accurately — what you can do as well as what you cannot. Do not exaggerate, and do not play it down out of politeness; “I’m fine” said to be agreeable turns up in the report as a finding. The report will be read against your medical records, so the accurate account is also the one that holds up.
- Bring your list of treatment, surgeries, medications and providers, and the dates.
- Note the time you went in and the time you came out, and what was actually examined.
- Read the report when it arrives. It has to be sent to you, and it should reach you the same day it reaches the carrier. Raise anything wrong with it straight away rather than months later.
- If you cannot attend, say so in advance, in writing, and keep the copy.
An exam is not the only way a carrier may try to shape your medical care. Some carriers also assign a nurse case manager who calls you or asks to come to your appointments. See a nurse case manager wants to talk to you: do you have to?
At permanency, the IME report usually becomes one of two competing opinions on your classification. See how judges weigh your doctor against the carrier’s doctor.
Talk to a New York workers’ compensation attorney
If you have an IME scheduled, or a report has come back saying something you know to be wrong, those are both moments where what happens next matters more than it appears to at the time.
The Law Offices of Frank J. Dito, Jr. represents injured workers throughout Staten Island and Brooklyn. Consultations are free. If we don’t recover money for you, we don’t get paid.
Call 718.701.2776 or 800.310.5520
1610 Richmond Road #200, Staten Island, NY 10304
Last reviewed September 2026. This page is on a six-month review cycle.
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