Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops to Investigate Their Own Customers
The author gets this topic utterly backward.  Large insurance companies each have essentially no business incentive to do anything except pay claims.  Maybe they try to get insureds back to baseline on the cheap, but deny an insured loss entirely?  No.  Not even investigate them.<p>And so fraudulent claims and the shadow industry that surrounds them grow in size until something bad happens, like a grandma dies in a commercially-staged motor vehicle accident.[1]  And then everyone gets all introspective and tries to figure out how we got to that regrettable point and what we can do to walk things back to a sane place where fraudulent activity is not acceptable.<p>Unfortunately, the basic incentives in the insurance industry still are, and always will remain, for companies to do as <i>little</i> as possible about fraudulent claims.  What I see in the facts reported by the article are companies that have used fraud investigators who are poorly trained or under-resourced and are generating erroneous or weakly-supported evidence of fraud, which the companies then hand off to public authorities who apparently have no better resources.  That leads to two observations:<p>1.  If the problem is irrational, counterproductive prosecutions due to poor training and resources, writing a hit-piece about supposed conflicts of interests over supplemental <i>funding</i> being used to patch the resource problems isn&#x27;t really part of the solution.<p>2.  The insurance companies are paying for the consequences of poor-quality investigations communicated to authorities by their investigators.  The article talks about some of the claimants suing the insurers for bad faith practices (and defamation?), which I&#x27;d call a &quot;cottage&quot; industry in the U.S., except that the industry is quite large and active.  The insurers named in the article most definitely have been incentivized to learn the lesson not to refer marginal fraud prosecutions-- maybe not to refer prosecutions at all-- and so we&#x27;ll repeat the cycle mentioned above until at a future time a grandmother, aunt or child is killed again in a staged fraudulent insurance claim, and then everyone will get introspective again and muse that at one point we had laws that incentivized insurers to identify and prosecute scam artists but bad press like this article led to changes that made them stop.<p>[1]  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifb.org&#x2F;(X(1)S(dzqyttjltzr0pry1l1wmvlxj))&#x2F;ContentPages&#x2F;CIFI&#x2F;DefaultCIFI.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifb.org&#x2F;(X(1)S(dzqyttjltzr0pry1l1wmvlxj))&#x2F;Conten...</a>