How we reported this project

Naples Daily News reporter Maria Perez studied the impact of Florida’s workers’ compensation law on undocumented immigrants during a nine-month O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University.

The Daily News reported this story by creating a database with information from state investigative records, thousands of court documents, criminal court data from the Office of the State Courts Administrator, workers’ compensation fraud arrests and case information from the Division of Investigative and Forensic Services.

Using the databases, the Daily News identified the cases of workers who were charged under Florida’s workers’ compensation fraud statute that makes it a crime to use false documents to obtain a job or work injury benefits.

Once the cases were identified, additional filings were reviewed in the workers’ criminal court cases and state insurance fraud reports for more details. The Daily News determined whether the workers charged had requested benefits from the insurer through the Office of the Judges of Compensation Claims.

The Daily News read thousands of pages contained in these filings and built a database that contains dozens of fields of information for each case, such as the employers of the workers, the insurer, their injury and whether the worker had to pay restitution.

The Daily News interviewed more than a dozen workers across the state charged under the law.