Document Retention – Boring But Necessary

While maybe not the most exciting topic, document retention is actually an important issue for insurance agents and brokers and can impact insurance agents’ and brokers’ professional liability insurance (E&O).  Clients may rely on the agent or broker (producer) to have copies of critical documents (read policies), and may hold their producer responsible for providing a copy in time of need. 

Recent articles in Business Insurance notes the importance of document retention (see here and here).

Best practices would be to treat your insurance articles as valuable assets and not subject to any document destruction program.

Document retention is actually easier to manage with new technology.  One example, which we have extensive experience with, is an imaging and processing system called ImageRight.  Document imaging and storage occurs within the normal business process.

There may be regulatory requirements for insurance producers, although we could not find any with a limited web search.  New York addresses the question, in part (see here).  Two other pages muddy the water however (see here and here).

There is no specific prescription for customer record retention by insurance agents and insurance brokers under the Insurance Law or Insurance Department Regulations … that provide record retention requirements for customer records of insurance agents and insurance brokers.  However, to the extent that an insurance agent or broker maintains customer records on an insurer's behalf, the insurance agent or broker is subject to the record retention requirements applicable to insurers in New York State…

Brought to you by Tennant Risk Services.

Comments

[Ned Vedo]

Great post. Being an insurance agent myself, I know how important it is to keep good records, and always have your documentation in order.

[low cost homeowner insurance]

are there specific state or federal rules/laws regarding how long a business should keep files or is this relegated to the type of insurance - such as variable, where we know there are such rules in place?