Congressmen Now Seek Broker Data

By Arthur D. Postal, Washington Bureau Chief

NU Online News Service, Oct. 19, 3:14 p.m. EDT, Washington?In the wake of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's charges of insurance brokerage price fixing, a brokers' lobbying organization has been asked by members of Congress to provide information about the industry.[@@]

The congressional inquiries were disclosed today by Joel Wood, senior vice president of government affairs at the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, whose membership includes most of the large brokerages that are the subject of Mr. Spitzer's probe.

Mr. Wood said, "We have received a number of calls asking for information from key congressional staff in both chambers who follow the insurance industry, and we are prepared to cooperate with them in any possible way."

Mr. Wood did not specify what he is being asked to provide or whose staff has sought the information. He would only say that, "What they ultimately wind up doing with this information is their call. I don't know what they will do with it.

A spokesman for Rep. Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, the panel which creates legislation governing the insurance industry, said Mr. Oxley was campaigning in Ohio and would not comment.

Mr. Wood said the CIAB sees itself as "a clearinghouse source on industry practices and information on how typical transactions work throughout the within the brokerage community."

He said his organization wants "to do everything we can to reflect the professionalism of our member firms amidst headlines and allegations that tend to paint an entire industry disproportionately."

Mr. Spitzer in a state civil suit filed Thursday against Marsh McLennan charged that its giant brokerage subsidiary, with the help of major insurers who made billions in payoffs to Marsh, had artificially fixed and inflated prices, rigged bids, and channeled clients to insurers who were part of the scheme. Two American International Group executives and one ACE employee have pled guilty to a role in the scheme.

But how Washington should deal with the revelations is in dispute.

Robert Hunter, current director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America, said the most appropriate way for Congress to deal with the issue is to restore the authority of the Federal Trade Commissioner to oversee insurance as part of its consumer protection authority.

FTC insurance oversight was deleted in legislation passed in 1981, he said. Mr. Hunter is also a former Texas insurance commissioner and federal insurance regulator.

Mr. Hunter said the Spitzer investigation "strengthens the hand of those who would want to point to the weakness of state regulation and might want to put minimum federal standards or otherwise do things to increase consumer protections."

But he said it does not help the State Modernization and Regulatory Transparency (SMART) Act, Congress' proposed legislation to reform the industry, which, in Mr. Hunter's view, "guts consumer protections and lessens regulatory control."

Mr. Hunter said the attorney general's investigation helps "those of us who say that it is good to have some federal oversight of state regulation. That's good. But I think it harms those who would use that oversight to pre-empt consumer protections in face of weaker federal standards."

In Mr. Hunter's perception, the SMART bill "would pick the lowest common denominator by adopting the lowest standards." By contrast, he would support the bill introduced in the Senate last year by retiring Sen. Hollings, D-S.C., which he said calls for "accepting the highest standards."

In general, Mr. Hunter concluded, the latest probe by Mr. Spitzer "doesn't move the smart bill forward. To weaken state standards in the face of this investigation is absurd."

Charles Symington, director of federal government affairs for the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, said he believes that the investigation by Attorney General Spitzer "helps make the case for the use of targeted federal legislation to improve the state-based system."

Mr. Symington said that the investigation is a "positive, not a negative, for the use of the federal tools approach [as contained in the SMART bill]."

The investigation, in his view, "hurts the case for an optional federal charter. In the past we have had scandals in the banking and securities industries, and now a new issue arising in the insurance marketplace. I would note parenthetically that both of those industries were federally regulated. And each time it has been a state official who's investigated them. It showed that the states are doing the job."

Meanwhile, the New York probe has been widening to include life as well as property-casualty products.

In California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi indicated he will move quickly to impose new disclosure and other rules relating to the placement services agreements?the contingency fees that are the core of the probe.

Mr. Garamendi, who announced an investigation some months back, has an inquiry focusing on employment benefit products.

If Congress does takes action to regulate brokers' fees, industry lawyers said one avenue might be to beef up a provision in legislation drafted by Rep. Oxley and Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., chairman of the Capital Markets Subcommittee of the Financial Services panel.

That measure deals with uniformity in licensing for agents and brokers,

Title IV of the bill calls for the states to adopt a model act establishing uniform licensing rules. That section sets up a mechanism whereby the states create their own standards. It outlines 12 areas in agent licensing uniformity for the states to come up with their standards. Sec. 403(b) mandates that the states establish guidelines for producer disclosures to consumers.

A lawyer familiar with the provision confirms that it is "broad enough to include state action on those [broker fee] issues." Indeed, officials of the National Conference of Insurance Legislators said they will take a look at this issue at their next meeting.

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Congressmen Now Seek Broker Data

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