NU Online News Service, June 17, 2:58 p.m.EDT

Mississippi joins Florida and Hawaii in signing the NonadmittedInsurance Multistate Agreement (NIMA) to implement the Nonadmittedand Reinsurance Reform Act of 2010—a surplus-lines-relatedcomponent of the Dodd-Frank financial-services reform bill.

The signing of this agreement, says Insurance Commissioner MikeChaney, protects up to $16 million in annual premium taxes, ofwhich $10 million goes to the Mississippi Windstorm UnderwritingAssoc., or Wind Pool, the state's last-resort insurer.

"Hopefully this will pave the way for more states to sign on andconserve badly needed general-fund revenue," says Chaney in astatement.

The NRRA mandates that beginning July 21, the insured's homestate will be the only state with jurisdiction over surplus-linestransactions, and the only state that can require a tax be paid bythe broker. States other than the home state stand to lose premiumtaxes in the case of multistate policies, says Chaney.

The measure is meant to increase the efficiency and uniformityof regulation of the surplus-lines insurance market, but Richard Bouhan, executive director of the National Associationof Professional Surplus Lines Offices (NAPSLO), says NIMA iscontrary to this objective.

Industry trade groups, including NAPSLO, the American InsuranceAssociation (AIA), and the Property Casualty Insurers Associationof America (PCI), are supporting an alternative compact calledSLIMPACT-Lite, or Surplus Lines Insurance Multi-State ComplianceCompact, which is promoted by state legislators, including theNational Conference of Insurance Legislators (NCOIL).

Most recently Tennessee and Alabama passed legislationauthorizing those states to join SLIMPACT. They are the eighth andninth states authorized to participate in the compact, whichbecomes official when 10 states join.