You are a logistics coordinator at a forward operating base in Kuwait, loading pallets under a LOGCAP task order. A forklift tips, a load shifts, and your back gives out. The camp medic stabilizes you, and within a week you are on a plane home with a herniated disc and no idea who pays for the surgery you now need.
This scenario plays out constantly for overseas government contractors. The Defense Base Act extends federal workers' compensation coverage to civilian employees working under U.S. government contracts abroad. It borrows its entire procedural machinery from the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act.
That borrowed machinery is the problem. The deadlines are federal, not state. The forms carry LS numbers, not the ones your state comp system uses. Miss a step and you can forfeit benefits you clearly earned.
Learning how to file a defense base act claim step by step is not optional knowledge for an injured contractor or the attorney representing one. The system rewards early, documented action and punishes delay. A worker who reports the injury the day it happens sits in a far stronger position than one who waits three months and tries to reconstruct events.
This guide walks through the full sequence. You will see when to notify your employer, what forms move the claim forward, which statutory clocks are running, and how the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs steps in. You will also see why identifying the insurance carrier is often the hardest part, and where that piece belongs in the process.
Each stage below builds on the one before it. Treat the deadlines as real, because a claims examiner and a defense carrier certainly will.
Step 1: Report Your Injury to the Employer Within 30 Days
The clock starts at the injury. Under Section 12 of the Longshore Act, codified at 33 U.S.C. 912, an injured worker generally must give the employer written notice of the injury within 30 days.
For an occupational disease that develops over time, the period generally runs from when you knew, or reasonably should have known, that the condition was work related. That distinction matters for slow-onset conditions like hearing loss or toxic exposure.
The form built for this notice is the LS-201, the Notice of Employee's Injury or Death. It captures the who, what, when, and where of the incident in the format the Department of Labor expects.
Do not treat the 30-day window as a hard cliff in every case. The statute contains excuse provisions. Notice can sometimes be excused if the employer already had knowledge of the injury, or if the employer was not prejudiced by the delay.
Still, relying on an excuse is a weaker position than simply filing on time. Written notice creates a dated record. A verbal mention to a supervisor who later leaves the company or denies the conversation gives you far less to stand on.
Keep a copy of whatever you submit. Note the date you handed it over and the name of the person who received it. That paper trail becomes evidence if the employer later claims it never learned of the injury.
The same discipline applies to the injury itself. Photograph the site if you safely can. Get the names of coworkers who saw what happened. Ask the camp clinic for a copy of the treatment note before you leave the country, because foreign medical records are often hard to retrieve later.
What Does the Employer File With the LS-202?
Once the employer has knowledge of a covered injury, the obligation shifts to them. The employer files the LS-202, the Employer's First Report of Injury or Occupational Illness, with the Department of Labor.
This is not your form to file, but you should understand it. The LS-202 is often the document that formally puts the injury into the federal system and alerts the insurance carrier that a loss has occurred.
The employer generally must submit the LS-202 within a short window after learning of a lost-time injury. The report identifies the employer, the worker, the nature of the injury, and, critically, the insurance carrier on the risk.
That carrier line is why the LS-202 matters so much to your claim. In a clean case, the first report names the exact company that will pay benefits or fight them. In a messy case, the line is blank, wrong, or lists a third-party administrator instead of the actual underwriter.
If your employer never files the LS-202, that failure itself can carry consequences for them. It does not stop you from moving forward with your own claim, and in some cases it can affect the deadlines the employer can later rely on.
Request a copy of the filed LS-202 early. It is one of the fastest routes to learning who the responsible carrier is supposed to be.
Step 3: File Your Claim for Compensation on Form LS-203
Notice to the employer is not the same as filing a claim. These are two separate legal acts with two separate deadlines. The LS-201 notice tells the employer you were hurt. The LS-203 is your actual demand for compensation, filed with the government.
The LS-203, the Employee's Claim for Compensation, is the document that formally launches your case within the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs. Skipping it, or filing it late, is one of the most common and most costly mistakes injured contractors make.
The deadline here is set by Section 13 of the Longshore Act, at 33 U.S.C. 913. For a traumatic injury, the claim generally must be filed within one year. If the employer has been paying compensation, that period can run from the date of the last payment instead of the date of injury.
Occupational disease and latent conditions can follow a different, sometimes longer timeline. Because those rules are fact-sensitive, it helps to review how the Section 913 deadline works for occupational disease before assuming your window has closed.
Completeness matters as much as timeliness. A rushed LS-203 with vague injury descriptions gives the carrier room to dispute what happened. If you want to see exactly how each box is used and misused, study how to read the completed LS-203 field by field.
Where you send the LS-203 also matters. Filing it with the wrong office can cost precious time even when you act inside the deadline. For overseas contract injuries, the claim generally belongs with the Department of Labor district office that handles Defense Base Act matters.
File the LS-203 even if some details are still uncertain. You can supplement the record later, but you cannot recover a deadline that has already passed.
How Does the OWCP DLHWC Handle Your Claim?
Your DBA claim does not go to a state agency or a court at first. It goes to the Division of Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation, the DLHWC, which sits inside the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs at the Department of Labor.
New DBA claims are filed with the OWCP office in Jacksonville, Florida, which serves as the Central Case Create Site for all Longshore Act and Defense Base Act cases. Jacksonville opens the case, then routes it to the district office that will administer it. Many overseas DBA claims, including those arising out of the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Europe, are administered by the New York district office rather than Jacksonville, so confirm which office holds your file.
A claims examiner is assigned to your case. This person is not a judge. Their role is administrative: they collect the forms, confirm coverage, monitor payments, and try to move the parties toward resolution without a formal hearing.
The examiner reviews the LS-203, the employer's LS-202, and the medical evidence. They confirm which carrier is on the risk and whether that carrier has accepted or disputed the claim.
Much of this now runs through an electronic system. Attorneys and represented workers increasingly manage submissions through the OWCP electronic filing workflow rather than paper and fax.
The examiner cannot force the carrier to pay. What they can do is apply pressure, request records, and, when a genuine dispute exists, schedule an informal conference to try to narrow it.
What Happens at an Informal Conference?
When the carrier disputes some part of your claim, the DLHWC will often schedule an informal conference. This is a common midpoint in the process, and it is worth understanding before you walk into one.
An informal conference is not a trial. There is no sworn testimony, no cross-examination, and no binding ruling. The claims examiner reviews the positions of both sides and issues a recommendation.
That recommendation is not an order. Either party can reject it. Its power is practical rather than legal, since it signals how the Department of Labor views the dispute on the current record.
Many disputes resolve at this stage. A carrier that hears an unfavorable recommendation may decide the cost of fighting outweighs the cost of paying, especially on a well-documented medical claim.
Preparation still pays off. Bringing organized medical records and a clear theory of the case can shift the examiner's recommendation in your direction. To understand the rhythm of these sessions, review what to expect at an OWCP informal conference.
If the conference fails, the claim does not die. It simply moves toward a formal hearing before an Administrative Law Judge, where the evidentiary rules tighten and the stakes rise.
Where Does Identifying the Insurance Carrier Fit In?
Here is the step most guides bury, even though it shapes everything. Before benefits can flow, someone has to identify the specific insurance carrier responsible for the injured worker.
In theory, the employer's LS-202 answers this question. In practice, it often does not. The named entity may be a third-party administrator, a broker, or a corporate parent rather than the underwriter that actually pays.
Overseas contracting makes this worse. Employers operate under multiple corporate names. Subcontractors sit three tiers below a prime. Carriers change every few years as contracts get rebid, so the carrier in 2014 may not be the carrier in 2019.
When the LS-202 is missing or wrong, you have to reconstruct the coverage from outside records. Federal contract data, adjudicated decisions, and FOIA database results can each hold a piece of the answer. None of them alone is usually enough.
This reconstruction is a distinct skill. It follows its own logic, and attorneys who handle DBA volume tend to run a repeatable process rather than starting from scratch each time. A structured approach, like the one described in a structured carrier investigation workflow, keeps the search from stalling.
Timing complicates the search further. A carrier that covered a contract in one year may have been replaced by the next award cycle. So the answer is not simply which company insured the employer, but which company insured that employer, on that contract, on the date of your injury. Get the date wrong and you can chase the wrong carrier for months.
ClaimTrove was built for exactly this bottleneck. It cross-references over a million federal records, from contract awards to adjudicated decisions to FOIA coverage filings, to surface the carrier behind a given employer, contract, and date. Run a free carrier investigation and see which carrier the data points to before you draft your LS-203.
What If the Carrier Disputes Your Claim?
Not every claim settles quietly. When a carrier formally contests your right to compensation, it typically files a notice of controversion, the LS-207. That document tells the Department of Labor the carrier is drawing a line.
A controverted claim that cannot be resolved informally gets referred to the Office of Administrative Law Judges. There, an Administrative Law Judge holds a formal hearing that looks much more like a trial.
At the hearing, sworn testimony, medical experts, and documentary evidence all come into play. The judge issues a written decision that, unlike the informal recommendation, is legally binding on both sides.
This is the stage where representation tends to matter most. The carrier will have defense counsel and retained medical experts. An unrepresented worker faces a steep learning curve on evidentiary rules and burden-shifting presumptions.
A decision by the Administrative Law Judge can be appealed to the Benefits Review Board, and from there into the federal circuit courts. Most claims never travel that far, but the path exists for the ones that do.
The through-line across every stage is documentation and timing. File the notice, file the LS-203, identify the carrier, and preserve your evidence. ClaimTrove helps you nail the carrier-identification piece so the rest of your claim rests on solid ground. Do that, and you give yourself the strongest possible footing no matter how far the dispute travels.