Texas Insurance Department Has Made Disciplinary Information Harder to Find
Fort Worth Star-Telegram—May 7th, 2012
With governments everywhere moving much of the people’s business online for easy accessibility, the Texas Insurance Department has taken a big step in the opposite direction.
Until September, the department, which promises to protect insurance customers, publicly released the names of insurance companies and agents who violated state rules. The September announcement, for example, noted that Great American Assurance Co. was fined $195,000 for failure to file policy forms or endorsements containing property and casualty benefits and that the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association failed to process claims in a timely manner or pay claims for storm damage that is a covered loss. Information on violators was also available in the department’s newsletter, TDInSight.
No longer.
Less than two months after Gov. Rick Perry appointed Eleanor Kitzman state insurance commissioner, the department abandoned its longtime practice of naming names. The information is now available, but with some heavy strings attached. You have to write and ask for it.
…
Alex Winslow, whose group Texas Watch monitors the Insurance Department, said Kitzman’s “job is to police the insurance industry and look out for the interests of policyholders. And if she’s sweeping these disciplinary actions under the rug, she’s doing the exact opposite. She’s covering the backsides of unscrupulous agents and insurance companies.”
Why is this information important?
“From a consumer’s point of view,” Winslow said, “that information must be public and must be available so that insurance customers know what they’re dealing with, whether it’s an unscrupulous agent or a company with a pattern of unfair claims practices. This is key information that insurance customers need when they’re making a decision about what agent and what insurance company to use, and how they’re going to spend their hard-earned money.”

