The list of moose lottery winners on the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Web site has long been a helpful reference tool for sportsmen looking for friends participating in the popular hunt.

Since 1994, it also has been a way for a Portland insurance company to catch people defrauding the workers’ compensation system.

Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Co. catches healthy hunters claiming they are disabled by comparing the list of moose permit holders on DIF&W’s Web site to MEMI’s list of claimants. Then the company sends out detectives to catch them – sometimes on videotape.

John Marr, MEMI’s vice president of claims since 1993, said the company does not do a data analysis of deer hunters, because the list of license holders is too long – as high as 180,000 some years – and it would be too cumbersome. In the Maine moose hunt this year, just 3,000 hunters were awarded permits.

MEMI might not stop with moose hunters, said Marr.

Asked if his company compared its database to DIF&W’s list of spring turkey hunt winners, also published on its Web site, Marr quickly considered the idea – and liked it.

“We haven’t. We might now,” Marr said during a phone call Thursday from Bethel.

Marr said in the past five years, MEMI, using the moose lottery permit list, has caught somewhere on the order of 15 to 20 false claimants with a high of seven in 1999.

As far as he knows, MEMI is the first to catch people wrongly claiming to be disabled by checking moose permits, Marr said, and now the practice is done in other states where there are moose hunts.

MEMI’s moose hunt investigation in Maine was the focus of a panel discussion at the ninth annual Business Insurance Workers Compensation and Disability Management Conference held in October in Coronado, Calif.

During the panel discussion that looked at how public information could be used, MEMI President John Leonard said seven of the claimants caught in 1999 were captured on videotape, four of them dragging away moose.

Marr said MEMI does this with other types of permits when possible.

“This has nothing to do with hunting,” he said. “It has nothing to do with any outdoor activity. It has everything to do with people who are stating that they are too incapacitated to do any type of laborious work.”

Marr said what the MEMI sleuths have looked for are healthy claimants who are hauling 700- to 800-pound moose out of the woods. But if claimants are riding in trucks watching their “subpermittee” doing the work, then they wouldn’t be bothered by MEMI.

Deirdre Fleming covers outdoor sports and recreation at the NEWS. She can be reached at 990-8250 or at dfleming@bangordailynews.net.