Over 25 years ago it was impossible for restaurants to buy workers’ compensation insurance. The NMRA and Grocers Association created the Food Industry Self-Insurance Fund (FISIF) to help our members find affordable work comp. FISIF is a workers’ compensation self-insurance program that brings NM’s food-industry business owners together to share their risk by pooling resources to cover their workers’ compensation losses.
At FISIF we offer aggressive claims administration with member participation in the claims decision making process. We strive for medical cost containment available through state-wide network of qualified health care providers.
We offer reasonable premium payment plans with no interest charges. You premium dollar is deposited in New Mexico banks, thereby benefitting New Mexico. We have competitive rates and large premium discounts.
Savings in the fund are available for refund to the membership.
The program is an alternative to purchasing a commercial workers’ compensation insurance policy and allows businesses to realize the cost efficiencies and savings instead of the insurance company.
The primary advantage is to take control over workers’ compensation risk by sharing the experience and resources that have been developed in this program over the past 30 years.
Similar to a decision to start and run a business, you choose to join other like-minded business owners to share the collective risks through a premiere team of workers’ compensation experts and share the accumulated safety resources and net program savings. With that ownership role comes the responsibility to follow established and effective group-practices proven to help control costs, as well as the benefit of actively participating in your risk management program.
The results can be seen in the prompt and effective handling of your valuable injured workers’ claims, intended to help bring your workers back to work, and in the consistently stable cost of your workers’ compensation coverage.
Since this is a group self-insurance program, there are no outside owners/shareholders that would be recipients of the program’s cost savings. Instead, the program collects a pro-rata share of funds (premiums) from each member business, with the objective of handling claims and covering administrative costs.
The program is administered by a fiscally responsible member-Board of Trustees, whose businesses also participate in the program. With time-proven practices, the program has consistently been able to handle costs and realize cumulative net fund savings. These savings are member-funds that are tracked by individual yearly operations and result in returned savings to those member businesses that helped contribute to the savings in a given year.
So far, over $17M has been returned to participating member businesses. The requirement for participating in a given year’s savings are: 1. that a member is in good standing (current with payments and has satisfied all other requirements of membership), 2. was a member business through the last day of a distribution year, and 3. that a member business beats the program’s loss ratio (ratio of losses divided by premiums) evidencing their contribution to the program savings.
Distributions typically occur after at least three years of claims development has past. The distribution in 2019 is the accumulation of various amounts from 2006 through 2013.
