Time For Crackdown On Insurance Frauds

Jonathan Hehir of Insuremyvan.ie shares his advice on how to prevent insurance fraud. There is a small, but arguably growing, cohort of professional fraudster in Ireland that are becoming increasingly litigious and adept at staged insurance fraud. Insurance companies have agreed to fund a new Garda unit that will be dedicated to investigating insurance fraudsters. It will be founded by insurers but will be operationally independent of them and is modelled on a similar fraud-buster unit in the UK. This development is not before time. The simple fact is the more fraudulent claims in the country, the more insurers will increase premiums across the board to recoup the losses incurred. It’s encouraging to see the industry work together to combat this growing epidemic and if the UK system is emulated, as is the intention, then I would be confident  that it would have an almost immediate effect of reducing the instances of claims – which will then have the knock - on effect of reducing premiums. Everyone has a role to play in doing what they can to clamp down on this behavior. Here at CFM we have invested both time and money into establishing our own fraud prevention team, which has been in place for over 24 months now. Our staff is trained to identify fraud at inception and our experience to date is that that this expenditure has benefited our customers in the form of lower premiums. And it’s not only motorists who are bearing the burnt – small businesses, particularly shop owners, are getting hammered with prohibitively high premiums on the back of expensive fraudulent public liability claims. Efforts have been made in the past by organisations like Insurance Ireland to deal with the issue. Insurance Confidential was established in 2003 by insurance Ireland. However, the scale and resources are simply not enough to deal with the level of fraud in the industry now has to contend with, and the involvement of the Gardaí on a larger scale is absolutely necessary. Jonathan Hehir, Managing Director of Insuremyvan.ie / CFMGroup.ie