The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has drafted a model act that is designed to provide states with the ability to collect fingerprints of insurance employees and submit the fingerprints to appropriate state law enforcement agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The NAIC is proposing to use its National Insurance Producer Database as the central repository for fingerprints and background information.

The group has received input from other trade associations regarding who in the industry should be fingerprinted and required to have criminal background checks. The Property Casualty Insurers Association of America has recommended that the NAIC draft be changed, limiting checks and fingerprints to “the officers and directors of companies directly involved in a transaction and not include subsidiaries, affiliates, or parent companies not involved in the transaction.”

PCI also has reservations about the centralized database envisioned by NAIC, which, it says, cannot exist in the current legal environment. “Although we primarily believe the focus of NAIC should be to obtain the federal legislation that all states need to access the FBI database to conduct criminal background checks, regulators continue to create new drafts of their proposed Authorization for Criminal History Records Model Act,” said Lenore Marema, PCI vice president, regulatory and industry affairs. “The reality is that we need model authorization legislation that would be limited to the statutory provisions needed in a state law for this background check process to exist.”