According to an article written by Anita Lee for The Sun Herald, more information continues to surface about State Farm's Fire and Casualty's post-Katrina claim practices and its alleged use of fraudulent engineering reports to deny claims. (For more information on the lawsuit, please click here.)

According to the article, two State Farm adjusters handling post-Katrina claims, sisters Cori and Kerri Rigsby, turned in more than 17,000 pages of records to federal and state investigators as evidence of State Farm's fraudulent practices.

The article goes on to say that one of those policyholders, Wesley McFarland, is suing State Farm because it wouldn't cover the wind damage to his home caused by Hurricane Katrina. Lee reports that in a secret protective order filed in U.S. District Court, State Farm tried to stop McFarland's attorneys, the Scruggs Katrina Group, from questioning its four employees regarding post-Katrina claims, including McFarland's. But because State Farm filed the protective order illegally, a judge ruled that the attorneys could proceed with the questioning.

According to Lee, the Rigsby sisters — now Scruggs Group employees — claim that once one of the four State Farm employees discovered that wind and water were the real causes of damage to slab cases along the Coast, including McFarland's, and storm-surge damage was ruled out, no more engineering reports were conducted. Wind damage is covered by insurance-company policies, but storm surge damage is not.

According to the article, McFarland's attorneys claim that McFarland's property was never evaluated.

State Farm still maintains that it has investigated all the post-Katrina claims they have received and has paid all policyholders what they deserve.

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