While the ICBC explores options to appeal last week’s judgement from the province’s Supreme Court ordering it to pay almost $400,000, an insurance industry group has spoken out on the necessity of pursuing evidence of fraudulent claims.
“Most of the claims the insurance industry looks at are valid,”
Insurance Bureau of Canada representative Kathy Metzger told the media after the court’s ruling. “There are some though and when fraud indicators appear on claims it’s our responsibility to look at them closer.”
Metzger, who stressed she was unable to comment on specific cases, pointed out the thorny nature of such frauds: “Every time we do something to stop a fraud, whether it’s deny a claim or have it prosecuted or anything like that, we’re teaching the bad guys what not to do the next time. So their schemes have become more sophisticated as we move along.
The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia itself cites the high cost of fraud to policy holders.
The provincial insurer, which was found liable for a malicious prosecution Wednesday of last week, puts the cost of fraud at about $100 per year for each of their policy holders.
The case at the heart of last week’s judgement concerned Danica Arsenovski, a recent immigrant to Canada who was hit while crossing the street with her husband in early 2000. Arsenovski, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, was later charged with fraud over the statement she gave to ICBC through an interpreter after the crash. That charge was later dropped.
In her ruling, BC Supreme Court justice Susan Griffin singled out the provincial insurer’s investigator for criticism, saying he had “operated from a presumption of guilt in respect of Mrs. Arsenovski.” The decision also described ICBC’s false fraud allegation as “so high-handed, reprehensible and malicious that it offends this Court’s sense of decency.”
