Retain Paper Records, Okla. E-Mails Agencies
By Michael Ha
NU Online News Service, April 21, 11:10 a.m. EDT?Insurance agents and producers in Oklahoma have been e-mailed an urgent regulator's notice warning them electronic records aren't good enough and they must keep paper and scanned copies of clients' original documents. [@@]
Insurance Commissioner Carroll Fisher explained in his notice that the Oklahoma law requires agents and producers to keep records on policy sales for three years. He pointed out, however, that not everyone has been following the law.
The commissioner said, for example, that an insurance company has been instructing agents in his state to enter data from client applications into a database, transmit the electronic data to the company without imaging, and shred the application?without keeping a copy. Commissioner Fisher warned that that procedure "does not comply with the statutory requirement."
The commissioner said the issue came to his attention during an investigation conducted by his department?he commented that in that particular case, his department's investigation of an alleged insurance fraud could have been proven if required records were available from agents.
"We have a law in Oklahoma that says you have to keep the original documents or scanned copies," said Oklahoma insurance department spokesman David Meuser. "One of the reasons is that sometimes fraud investigators will need to go back to the original applications and look at the signatures. We had a company that had instructed its people to enter the information into the database and then destroy the original document without scanning it in," Mr. Meuser told National Underwriter.
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