Adjusters provide pay or pressure
By RANDY DIAMONDPalm Beach Post Staff Writer Monday, April 21, 2008
After a pipe burst in their laundry room and flooded their house west of Boca Raton last December, Tom and Carolyn Palmiotto were confident their insurance company would take care of renovations.
And it did.
Hiring a public adjuster 101
• public adjusters are required by law to be licensed by the state of florida. only public adjusters and attorneys are allowed to represent you with your insurance company claim. other professionals, such as roofers, are not allowed to directly negotiate with an insurer on your behalf.
zwhere to check: you can find out whether your adjuster is licensed by calling the department of financial services at (877) 693-5236 or by going to the department web site at www.myfloridacfo.com. zreferrals: experts suggest the best way to find a licensed public adjuster is through referrals from satisfied customers. you can also find whether the adjuster is a member of a professional association such as the florida association of public insurance adjusters, which encourages its members to pursue extensive continuing education programs. the association offers a membership list on its web site: www.fapia.net.
zcomplaints: complaints can be filed by calling the department of financial servicesor by visiting the department's web site.
SOURCE: STAFF RESEARCHLawmakers take on public adjusters
Bills in the Florida Legislature would make major changes in the laws regulating public adjusters: l Limit fees to 10 percent for hurricane claims and 15 percent for reopened supplemental hurricane
claims as well as non-hurricane claims. Another bill would cap fees at 20 percent but allow unlimited fees for supplemental claims.
As hundreds of claims from the 2004 and 2005 hurricanes continue to be filed against insurers, there is increasing criticism that public adjusters seeking to enrich themselves are persuading homeowners to press claims that aren't legitimate.
Competing bills currently going through the legislature would do such things as bar homeowners from receiving inducements like cash payments to sign up with a public adjuster. Other proposals include capping fees and tightening license requirements, and limiting in-person solicitations after a hurricane.
The Florida Insurance Guaranty Association, which is handling claims from the failed insurance companies of the Poe Financial Group, says public adjusters are behind almost every one of the 150 or so reopened claims it is
l Bar direct soliciting for 14 days following a hurricane and 72 hours after a fire or other event. No soliciting would be allowed between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. A different proposal bars solicitations for 48 hours and sets the time limit between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.
l Require newly licensed adjusters to serve as apprentices for a year. l Bar inducements - cash or merchandise - for signing up with an adjuster. l Bar adjusters from making loans to clients or advancing recovery money.
Source: Staff research
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receiving each month from homeowners maintaining they were underpaid for damage from Hurricane Wilma in October 2005.
Charging 50 percent 'not right'
One week last month, the guaranty association received 300 claims from one South Florida adjusting firm, American Adjustment and Arbitration, says Michelle Lovern, the association's deputy director. American has been aggressively soliciting South Florida residents through circulars warning residents that they may have been underpaid for their Hurricane Wilma claims and that the matter can be reopened at no charge or obligation, she said.
''I feel a little bit abused by their approach,'' Lovern said.
Jacob Pollack, owner of Fort Lauderdale-based American Adjustment and Arbitration, admits his circulars are designed to attract attention and says he has distributed 50,000 of them in Palm Beach and Broward counties. But 40 percent of the customers who approach him are rejected after he does an initial investigation of the claim, he says.
Pollack says he gets paid only if his clients get paid, so it doesn't make sense to file claims that aren't legitimate. ''That would be a stupid business decision,'' he said.
Many homeowners didn't know they could file claims with the guaranty group after the Poe companies failed in 2005, Pollack says, adding that he submitted the 300 new claims in the one week to meet the group's June deadline.
Pollack charges his clients a fee of up to 33 percent, which would be illegal under one of the pending bills. That bill, which has cleared the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee, would cap fees at 10 percent for hurricane claims and 15 percent for non-hurricane claims.
Currently there is no fee limit, and some adjusters are charging homeowners as much as 50 percent of the recovery they receive from an insurance company, says William Coffman, president-elect of the Florida Association of Public Insurance Adjusters.
''It's not right,'' said Coffman, who is based in Miami Beach and works with homeowners throughout South Florida. ''It would leave the homeowner without enough money to fix their property. I tell my adjusters that if you can't make money at 10 percent, you should not be handling the claim.''
Competence questioned
But the legislation does not directly address another major issue, the competence of many of the state's 2,800 public adjusters, most of whom entered the business after the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons. Coffman says many adjusters don't have the proper knowledge of insurance claims to do a decent job for property owners.
''Probably 50 percent know what they are doing and 50 percent don't," he said.
Among the more than 2,000 people who became public adjusters after the hurricanes were many without knowledge of the insurance field, Coffman says.
''People realized there was a lot of money to be made in insurance,'' said Coffman, who has been an adjuster for more than 20 years. ''It was a quick way to make a buck."
Easing their way was a relaxation of the rules to become a public adjuster from July 2004 through last June, says Terry Butler, the state's acting insurance consumer advocate.
Butler says the legislature decided to allow adjuster candidates to skip a state exam and to become licensed by taking educational classes offered by private schools.
Many of the courses were Internet-based and had an open-book approach to testing, says Besserman, the Palmiottos' adjuster and a former president of the Florida Association of Public Adjusters. "Students could look up the answer or call an experienced adjuster for the answer,'' he said.
Michael Birzone, a lawyer who has run one of the more popular courses through a continuing education program at the University of Central Florida, says no one has ever failed his class. He says students were allowed to take the test until they passed.
Birzone defended the approach, saying looking up the answers allowed students to learn the material and taught them to think during property inspections.
"We're trying to simulate conditions in the field," Birzone said.
Besserman says he doubts many licensed adjusters could pass the reinstituted examination. Since the state resumed testing in June, fewer than 28 percent of the 566 applicants have passed the examination on the first try, according to statistics from the Department of Financial Services.
Adjusters being investigated
There also have been many complaints about adjusters. Since July 2004, which is as far as comprehensive records go back, the state has opened 294 investigations, 42 of which have led to
suspension or revocation of licenses or fines against adjusters. One adjuster lost his license permanently. Barry Lanier, who directs the investigations at the Department of Financial Services, says most of the cases involve charges that adjusters did little or no work on clients' claims.
Competing bills to tighten regulations for public adjusters have cleared committees in the House and Senate but have yet to be considered by either chamber.
Officials of the Florida Adjusters Association, whose membership numbers less than 500 of the state's 2,800 adjusters, say bad public adjusters are giving an honorable profession a bad name and taking the spotlight away from the reason public adjusters exist in the first place: Insurance companies routinely underpay claims.
Besserman, whose Boca Raton firm is called Consumer Protection, says good public adjusters can even the playing field because they understand what homeowners are entitled to under their insurance
contracts. The Palmiottos, who hired Besserman for their laundry-pipe claim, have hired him again to redress the wrong they say their former insurer, American International Group, committed when it paid them a partial settlement for the damage Hurricane Wilma did to their roof and screen enclosure. A spokesman for New York-based AIG says the company is reviewing the Palmiottos' claim.
''Filing a claim without being represented by a public adjuster is like going to divorce court with your spouse's attorney,'' Besserman said.
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