A Montana insurer handed its regulator PDFs instead of spreadsheet data. The state's top court just signed off on a $75,000 fine.
The Montana Supreme Court ruled on May 12, 2026 that Victory Insurance Co. broke the state Insurance Code by failing to give the insurance commissioner records in a form the agency could actually use. The decision affirms both the District Court's order and the underlying final agency decision, leaving the maximum statutory fine in place across three violations.
The backstory matters. Victory served as a managing general agent for Clear Spring Property and Casualty Company's workers' compensation business in Montana. When Clear Spring moved to end the arrangement and told regulators that Victory was refusing to release its MGA data, the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance opened an administrative case. On September 3, 2021, the commissioner wrote to Victory demanding every record it held related to the Clear Spring relationship. The letter was specific about format: comma-separated value files, unless the data's native format was not suited to that conversion.
Victory responded with two large batches of PDFs and an email pointing the regulator to a file-transfer site holding samples of what had already gone to Clear Spring and to third-party administrator Tristar. None of it was in the spreadsheet format the commissioner had asked for. Victory's position was that it did not use that file type and that Clear Spring already held the underlying data.
The agency was not persuaded. A hearing examiner granted summary judgment for the commissioner, finding Victory violated § 33-2-1602(4) of the Montana Code Annotated by failing to provide records in a form usable to the regulator. Special Deputy Insurance Commissioner Matthew Cochenour adopted that recommendation and imposed the statutory maximum – $25,000 for each of three violations, for a total of $75,000. Two of those violations stemmed from contract terms missing from Victory's deal with Clear Spring; the third was the records failure itself.
The statutory interpretation question is worth pausing on, because it has implications well beyond this case. Victory's argument on appeal was that the statute imposed an objective test – records were usable if they were technically capable of being opened – and that the commissioner had to prove the PDFs failed that bar. The Supreme Court rejected the reading. The statute, the court said, deliberately distinguishes records usable by the insurer from records usable to the commissioner. If lawmakers had wanted a single objective standard, the wording would not have split the two. The takeaway for any managing general agent operating in Montana: the regulator gets to define what "usable" means when it asks for records, subject only to a reasonableness check tied to the data's native format.
The PDF backstory did not help Victory either. The company told the hearing examiner it had kept records on paper and had to scan them in. The examiner pushed back, pointing to file metadata showing the documents had been printed to PDF from a spreadsheet program rather than scanned. Victory's counsel did not have an answer. The examiner concluded Victory had gone out of its way to frustrate the investigation and had been untruthful about how the PDFs were produced.
That conduct also drove the size of the fine. Victory argued on appeal that the commissioner should have stuck to the $5,000-per-violation figure in § 33-2-1605(1)(a), MCA, not reached for the $25,000 ceiling in § 33-1-317, MCA. Reading the two provisions together, the Supreme Court held the commissioner has authority to impose fines up to $25,000 for managing general agent breaches. The agency had pointed to a facially illegal contract, willful obstruction of the investigation, and misrepresentations to the hearing examiner. That was enough, the court said, to take the penalty out of arbitrary-and-capricious territory.
For carriers and MGAs with Montana exposure, the message from the court is uncomplicated. A regulator's records demand defines the format. If an MGA cannot produce records in the form requested, it needs to explain – on the record – what its native format actually is and why the requested conversion is not workable. Quiet noncompliance, dressed up as technical compliance, is not a strategy the courts will protect.
Justice Beth Baker wrote the opinion. Justices James Jeremiah Shea, Laurie McKinnon, Ingrid Gustafson and Jim Rice concurred.
