The South Carolina Situation

As reported in WorkCompCentral, my company, Advanced Insurance Management (AIM) is currently trying to get the South Carolina legislature to close a loophole that has allowed insurance companies to get away with overcharging some South Carolina employers on Workers Comp insurance.

At the moment, the effort to close the loophole is struggling, I fear. (That old adage about not wanting to see how sausage and legislation gets made---very true.) The SC legislature is winding down its current session, and there are a lot of other issues clamoring for the attention of the wise solons of SC. But we're not finished yet, so stay tuned.

This all relates to our ongoing work to recover overcharges for South Carolina employers who were victimized by insurance companies not properly reporting to NCCI claims reimbursements they got from the Second Injury Fund. Although we've been able to get the money back for a number of employers, in some cases the rip-off (sorry--error) occurred long enough ago that current NCCI rules prohibit correcting the experience modifiers now. Of course, the reason that the problem wasn't addressed sooner was that the insurance companies ignored NCCI rules in years past, and NCCI didn't police their own rules. So it wasn't until AIM got involved, years later, that this little scheme was uncovered.

It's funny--insurance companies expend a lot of time and effort in catching policyholders who aren't following the rules (and not paying proper Workers Comp premiums). But apparently, when it is the insurance companies themselves who benefit from breaking the rules, they are not so scrupulous in insisting that things be made right. And that surely undermines the integrity of the entire Workers Comp system.