Valen Technologies, an advanced data and analytics provider for property & casualty insurance leaders, reveals the first of its Valen Network Data (VND) reports, revealing trends identified within Valen's vast consortium data pool. Valen has a large data consortium for workers' compensation, pulling from 4 million recent policies. Valen is mining this information to provide insurance carriers with proprietary insights that will assist them in improving underwriting performance.

Examining the four-year period between 2008 through 2011, the first VND report provides insight into which industries have the highest payroll misclassification.  Of the 20 distinct industries identified by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), construction has the largest percentage of misclassified payroll resulting in an average of 14 percent, or $76.8 billion in post-recession payroll, according to the VND report. The misclassified payroll in construction is highly concentrated in 15 job classification codes, according to Valen.

"We understand that workers' compensation is a difficult line of business to predict accurately, and misclassification is a struggle for every insurer. For this reason, we are utilizing our data to expose interesting trends and insights to the industry, for carriers to act upon," says Dax Craig, president and CEO of Valen Technologies. "Carriers who identify misclassification using various predictive tools are able to better identify those policies that are likely to contain misclassified exposure.  These carriers are thus able to better manage operating costs and ensure better adherence to their underwriting appetite."