The Assessor
Our regular column by a motor insurance claims assessor. No matter what he does, he gets stomped on by either his boss or the repairers. These are his stories.
Regular readers of this column most likely know that I’m not a huge fan of online image assessing. Any assessor working with them will agree that the images are only as good as the skill of the person taking them. Deliberate or not, the detail in the images is often unclear or ill-defined.
The unscrupulous in our industry have seen online assessing as an opportunity to pull a swifty. The lack of physical presence of an assessor in their workshop is just too much of a temptation for them and they just have to have a go.
Here’s a couple of the more notable responses received (we had two identical models of the same colour, and because they were the same colour we sent the wrong images):
‘It wasn’t me – it was the admin staff member who downloaded the wrong images.’ This was the response after the vehicle arrived, which clearly showed the damage scoped was ‘different’ to the damage on the vehicle. That instils confidence, doesn’t it?
50 Grand Dent
Talking about these issues with colleagues, more stories emerged of other brazen attempts at ripping off the image-based systems. There’s no doubt that the system can be open to severe abuse. Imagine we’re in heavy traffic when a car bumps the near-side rear bar of a luxury coupe. Damage to the luxury coupe is minor – just a dented rear bar, minor dent on the rear beaver and a small scratch and dent on the near side rear quarter panel where it met the rear bar. A third party claim against the insurance company is lodged.
Unbelievably, the quote for the repairs on that car is just over 50 grand, excluding GST. The repairer wants to be paid nearly 14 grand for pulling everything from the bonnet back and just over four grand for repairing he beaver panel. Another 19 grand for 253.5 hours for paintwork to prepare and repaint the turret, front pillars, door apertures and the whole back-end. A quick calculation will tell you that it comes to over 37 grand in labour alone, leaving the cost of parts at around 13 grand.
The assessor assigned to such a job might dare to question the repairer as to the logic and necessity of such a large scale of repair for what are two minor dents. He may face a tirade of abuse from a luxury repairer who says they know the repair methods for such a fine beast best. The assessor might have the nous to take photos of the damage with the car’s rear bar and tail lights removed.
The assessor is likely to apply some rigorous adjustments to such a huge estimate – perhaps around 11 grand – bringing the quote down to a still inconceivable 39 grand.
Imagine this assessor follows up the repair a few weeks later and alarm bells ring loudly as the car is nowhere to be seen. Despite the hundreds of hours of labour on the quotation, it had already been repaired and returned to its owner.
The brazen repairer isn’t fazed when confronted with this impossible feat, and the implication that the work wasn’t carried out as per the quotation. He claims that he had images he’d taken of the work in progress. He continues to insist it was 50 grand worth, and he was going to fight the insurance company for every cent of it.
The series of photos from the repairer arrive at the insurance office. They were not date-stamped, and show the luxury coupe totally stripped down from the bonnet back. Only a very keen-eyed assessor would notice that something was amiss and put the photos sent in side by side with the photos the assessor had taken. After many hours of staring a breakthrough, one of them spots the alloy wheels are a different design in the two sets of photos. Other minor detail differences then become obvious on closer inspection. So a different car to the one that was quoted is actually stripped down. The investigators could now, as quick as a flash, gather further evidence to build a case against the repairer.
You can image that a car’s owner would find it hard to believe the original 50 grand quotation and would happily make their car available for testing its painted surfaces by an independent automotive paint expert. Those tests would confirm any lack of new paint that was claimed for.
A matter like this would end up in court and a judgement likely made in the insurance company’s favour.
The stripped-down car in the repairer’s photos could have been undergoing major warranty work to access its complicated electrical and computer systems. This does illustrate how the system could be fraudulently manipulated. Those photos were probably meant for the manufacturer of the luxury coupe, but were thought to be also useful in a scam. Nice try!
