Your workers' comp premium comes out of one calculation. Nobody checks it.
Three things decide that number, and somebody else prepares all three. The first is a payroll audit, which counts what you actually paid your staff. The second is a set of class codes, the categories your workers are filed under, which set the rate charged for each one. The third is an experience modification worksheet, a multiplier built from your own past claims. All three are routinely wrong in the carrier's favour, and most employers never check any of them. Koala checks all three, and files the correction when the numbers do not hold.
How Koala is paid
No commissionsWhat that buys you
No upfront cost
We're paid a share of what a correction actually recovers. Find nothing, owe nothing.
You stay in control
Nothing is filed with a carrier or bureau without your approval.
Independent
Koala earns no commission, represents no carrier, and places no coverage.
Who pays us
contingent · paid out of recovery
| Party | Relationship to Koala | Fee to us | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our only client | Our only client | Share of recovery | |
| Counterparty on every filing | Counterparty on every filing | None | |
| Not involved unless you involve them | Not involved unless you involve them | None | |
| No appointment held | No appointment held | None | |
| Commission, override, or referral income from carriers, brokers, and agents | Commission, override, or referral income from carriers, brokers, and agents | $0 | |
Why it is that way
The employer. Our only client. Fee to us: Share of recovery. The only party that pays Koala anything. The fee comes out of money a carrier or rating bureau has already returned to you, which means Koala earns more only in the cases where you keep more. There is no arrangement in which we are paid well on a file that recovered nothing.
That is the fee model in full. There is no second page to it.
At the end of every policy year, someone you did not hire opens your payroll records and decides what your insurance was worth. That is the premium audit. They map your employees to class codes, decide which of your subcontractors count as your employees, and send a bill. Almost everyone pays it. It arrives on carrier letterhead and it is written in code numbers. Arguing with it means learning a rating manual most people outside the industry have never opened.
The errors are not exotic. They are the same handful, over and over.
Payroll swept into one high-rated code
Everybody lands in the most expensive class code because nobody split out who actually does what.
Clerical and outside sales staff overcharged
Office staff and field sales staff are never given the lower-rated codes they are entitled to.
Officer payroll charged above the cap
Each state sets a maximum payroll figure for a company officer. Charge above it and you are paying premium on wages that should never have counted.
The whole of overtime put into the rating base
Only the straight-time part of an overtime hour belongs in the payroll figure your rate is applied to. Often the whole of it goes in anyway.
A subcontractor billed as your employee
You are charged for someone else's crew while their valid certificate of insurance sits in a folder nobody asked for.
The experience modification itself
This one is its own category. A claim carried at a reserve it will never settle for. A medical-only claim not discounted the way the rating plan requires. Or the payroll reported to the rating bureau does not match the payroll reported to the state. The rating bureau is the body that publishes class codes and rates for your state, and it is what calculates your mod.
None of that requires genius to find. It requires someone who knows where to look, can show the arithmetic, and can name the rule the number breaks. It also requires someone willing to put their name on a filing. So that is the job we gave ourselves.
We rebuild the premium from the published rate tables and show the working. Every finding is reviewed internally before it goes anywhere. Nothing reaches your carrier or the rating bureau until you have said yes to it.
We get paid out of what comes back, and only out of what comes back. No retainer, no hourly, no fee on savings we did not produce. We will not promise you a recovery, because we cannot. A bureau can rule a correction out of time. A carrier can simply disagree. Any consultant who guarantees you a refund is selling you something. A denied filing costs you nothing. And you can check our work, line by line, which is the only arrangement we would accept if we were the ones being billed.
The founding team, Koala
Four things we don't bend on.
A premium consultant is worth hiring only if you can tell whose side they are on and check what they tell you. Both of those are structural. Neither one survives being added later, so they were settled before anything was built.
Show the arithmetic, cite the rule
We never ask you to take a finding on faith. Each one shows its calculation and names the rule it rests on: a class code definition, a rating manual rule, or a rule published by the bureau. Your broker can check it. So can the carrier's own auditor.
Model output is not a finding, and a finding is not a filing
Software does the reading. What comes out of it is only a candidate. Every candidate is reviewed internally, with its calculation and the rule behind it, before it counts as a finding at all. A finding is still not a filing. Nothing reaches your carrier, the rating bureau, or a regulator without your written approval, and you can pull a filing at any point.
No upfront cost, and no fee on savings we didn't produce
No retainer, no hourly, nothing to sign a check for before we've found anything. We're paid a share of the savings a correction actually delivers, after the carrier or bureau approves it. If a filing is denied, that's our risk, not your invoice.
Independent of every carrier and broker
Koala takes no commission, override, or referral fee from any insurance carrier, broker, or agent, and we don't sell or place coverage. The only party paying us is the employer whose premium we're checking. Any other arrangement would make the answer worth less than the fee.
Every party to your workers' comp premium works from the same rating manual. You are the only one who was never expected to read it.
Why we started Koala
We're small, and early.
Koala is built by a small founding team, and every finding is reviewed internally before it is filed. That is the only claim on this page about who we are that has any bearing on your file.
Today that work is Texas workers' compensation. The rules that decide a class code and set an experience mod are written state by state, so we would rather cover one state properly than several badly.
There are no executive bios here, and that is not modesty. At this stage a bio describes a company's marketing rather than its work, and the hours it would take are better spent on the review itself. No headshots, no titles, no advisory board.
Colophon
Introductions coming soon
When there are people and roles worth introducing, they will be here by name, with what they actually do.
We're not hiring yet.
And we won't post roles we can't fill just to look bigger than we are. But if making workers' comp premium verifiable is the kind of problem you'd give years to, we'd still like to know you exist. The work splits three ways: premium audit and experience rating, engineering, and design.
Not looking for a job? Then the fastest way to understand what we do is to send us two documents. Your most recent final audit statement, which is the bill that closed out your last policy year, and the experience mod worksheet that goes with it. There is no upfront cost, and you see the arithmetic either way.
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