A Thursday decision by Ohio’s Tenth District Court of Appeals sent a physical and mental workers compensation claim back to the Industrial Commission, saying the state’s “new and changed circumstances” requirement to repeat permanent total disability applications was incorrectly applied.
In 2025-Ohio-5234, the court held that the commission was wrong when it denied a 66-year-old worker’s second permanent disability application under a 2021 change in law that requires a claimant who has previously been denied to “present evidence of new and changed circumstances” before a subsequent application may be considered.
The Commission’s staff hearing officer denied the worker’s 2023 permanent total disability application after finding no “meaningful or substantial” new and changed circumstances. The Tenth District said that language effectively heightened the statute’s threshold in a way the General Assembly did not authorize.
“The statute does not require that the evidence presented be meaningful or substantial,” the court wrote, agreeing with a magistrate’s earlier analysis. By inserting that requirement, the commission “effectively added language to the statute” and thereby abused its discretion, the ruling states.
The worker’s medical record, which included several work injuries and comp claims, showed work-related neck, back and psychological conditions. Yet, he had been found capable of sedentary work when the Commission denied his first permanent total disability application in 2021, relying on its own specialists.
After that denial, however, he received an initial permanent partial disability award and later increases in PPD percentages on two separate comp claims. New commission-selected specialists also examined him in late 2023 and concluded he was incapable of work due to both his physical and psychological conditions.
In denying the second permanent total disability application, the hearing officer emphasized that there were no new allowed conditions, no surgeries, no temporary total disability paid, and no vocational rehabilitation efforts, and ordered a discounted subsequent award as not “meaningful or substantial” evidence of change. The order did not address the later reports from the commission’s own specialists that found the man unable to work.
The court held it could not accept the Commission’s argument that its denial was nonetheless supported by “some evidence” when the wrong legal standard was used. It stressed that the Commission, not the court, must weigh the evidence, but only under the correct statutory test.
The appeals court also signaled that evidence generated after the filing of a repeat permanent total disability application, including reports from the commission’s own experts and increases granted under state law, may be part of the “new and changed circumstances” showing, so long as it is in the record when the application is adjudicated.
The court did not decide whether the worker is entitled to permanent total disability; only that his second application must be evaluated again under the statute as written.