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The Spitzer Effect

Therese Rutkowski, Managing Editor September 2005

Nearly a year has passed since New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charged insurance brokerage firm Marsh & McLennan with rigging bids to maximize its commissions with insurance carriers.

Allegations against Aon, AIG, ACE and other brokers and insurers followed-and within weeks, the country's largest insurance brokers-Marsh, Aon and Arthur J. Gallagher-as well as AIG and ACE had ceased the practice of accepting (or paying) contingent commissions.

More recently, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), Kansas City, Mo., adopted amendments to its Producer Licensing Model Act, calling for producers who do continue to accept contingency fees from carriers-and who are also paid by their clients-to disclose those fees to their clients and document proof of that disclosure (see "NAIC amends the Producer Licensing Model Act," below).

What does all this activity mean to carriers and brokers? What effect will "Hurricane Eliot" ultimately have on producer compensation in the industry?

Contingent commissions probably won't cease to exist, industry experts concur, but Spitzer has forced the industry to examine how it manages producer compensation.

In particular, carriers need to make sure they have the internal controls in place to document and audit their compensation practices-as do those brokers who collect the fees in question.

"Brokers and carriers have to make sure the right disclosures were made by the right people at the right time-and that they can document it," says Donald Light, senior analyst at Celent Communications Inc., a Boston-based research and advisory firm to the financial services industry.

"That takes time and costs money, but there's no big mystery about how to do that," he says. "Between document management, workflow and business process management systems, it's fairly easy."

More interesting is the challenge that faces the country's largest brokers to find ways to recoup the revenue they previously collected from contingent commissions, Light says. And smaller brokers and carriers will eventually be faced with process and technology fixes to accommodate new regulations and the migration of less profitable, smaller commercial accounts to regional distributors.

A lot like SOX

"This issue is very much like Sarbanes-Oxley," says Greg Wynne, director of product and industry marketing for Callidus, a San Jose, Calif.-based incentive management system provider.

A lot of companies want to have stronger incentive compensation systems in place, but they often put the decision off until next year, he says. "But then the SOX auditors came in and said, 'Gee, you're running $2 billion worth of commissions through spreadsheets. How are we supposed to audit that?'"

Indeed, because of Sarbanes-Oxley, companies were already examining their "information supply chains" to identify any exposure to errors, inaccuracies or chicanery and build the necessary controls to eliminate those gaps, according to sources.

"Spitzer just heightened the urgency and focused attention on finite reinsurance and contingency commissions," notes Andrew Whalen, vice president, insurance and healthcare, at Unitech Systems Inc., a Naperville, Ill.-based automated control firm.

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