With motor vehicle claims speeding past $9.4 billion last year, the Insurance Association of Jamaica (IAJ) is partnering with revenue authorities and the police to roll out a database early in the new year, aimed at dragging down insurance fraud.

The Insurance Vehicle Information System (IVIS) is one of the major strategies being established by the industry, to detect and deter motor vehicle insurance fraud.

Last year, out of gross general insurance claims of $13.2 billion, insurance companies paid out $9.4 billion – the bulk – in motor vehicle claims.

Executive director of the IAJ Orville Johnson disclosed in a Jamaica Observer interview that worried insurers were “putting together an information system on motor vehicles…What will happen is that when you go to license your car, the tax department won’t rely on the papers you present; they will go into a database which will be fed directly by the insurance industry”.

“Similarly, the police will rely on that when they stop you on the road rather than ask you for the paper. A lot of people have been very clever [with]counterfeit cover notes and insurance certificates. You won’t be able to use that, so you will have bonafide [information] coming from a database from an insurance company which will be uploaded almost on a real time basis and they will rely on that, because they (the police) can access it from their smartphones,” Johnson said.

The IAJ executive director pointed out that the industry faced similar issues of fraud in other areas, such as staged accidents, for example. Insurance companies covered 380,000 vehicles annually, “but depending on who you talk to, it’s about 500,000 cars on the road”.

He said that the association had not been able to quantify in monetary terms the amount of claims that were fraudulent, since estimates varied widely. “The problem with the figures is that you can’t tell. People do all kinds of estimates,” he said.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/insurance-claims-climbing-a-billion-a-year_151777