This quantification in the recent report puts a seal to what insurance regulators, attorney general, and controllers from other states already estimated. According to their estimate, the amounts were to top $1 billion and this is what actually happened. For the past two years, officials have been steadily investigating the biggest insurance companies in the country and their findings now are surely a revelation. According to state findings, in many of these cases the policyholders died without the beneficiaries knowing about their claim amounts.
Insurance companies deny responsibility for such unpaid claims. According to them, it is the duty of policyholders and the beneficiaries to notify the company, when the death of an insured occurs. Store of the insurance holders is quite knowledgeable as per the company claims, and only a handful of people who are ignorant of their dues. Most of the insurance companies say that they follow regulations in such cases and hand over such amounts to the department for unclaimed property.
Financial services department New York has directed insurance companies to go through their existing death database and find out about any overdue policies. In order to hasten this process and make it mandatory, Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a law legislation to make regular searches a permanent feature. It demands searching of records on a regular basis for identification of the policyholder’s death and locating beneficiaries. This ensures complete payment of insurance proceedings in the coming times.
Taking a leaf from New York, other states have also reached settlements that require insurance companies including AIG and MET conduct regular checking of policyholder information. This includes matching up insurers name with those in death database while tracking down survivors, if any. While the companies and not owning up to the responsibility of unpaid amounts they are ready to cooperate with the new directives for identification of such denied claims.
Initial results of this probe are quite enthusiastic with close to one hundred thousand people recently getting payments from various insurance companies. Out of these, 25,000 people were from New York alone. Amounts paid to them were a whopping $ 386 million.
