This one hits close to home. A family member wanted my help to fix a problem she is having with her auto insurance company. They say her husband was at fault in an accident that occurred in 2023 while he was driving a company-owned vehicle. Of course, following the rules of accident reporting, the driver did his duty by completing the accident report form at the Oregon DMV. Now, every time he applies for auto insurance, an accident shows up on his record for that date.
Auto insurance companies charge a little more in premiums if you are involved in an accident, whether or not you were at fault. I know, that doesn’t sound fair, but they do. I’ll explain later. They even charge a little more still if you were injured in the accident, again, at-fault or not. Then, if you were found at-fault in the accident, they charge a lot more. And these extra charges can last three years, five years, and in some cases, up to seven years!
“But how can they make my premiums go higher when I wasn’t at fault?” you might ask.
Good question. The way auto insurance companies in Oregon get away with it is not by charging you for an accident; rather, they take away discounts. Those are two different things but have the same effect: they make the price of your insurance go up. Those discounts go by a few names, but some of them are: safe driver discount, responsible driver discount, claim-free discount, accident-free discount, and more. Look for language like that on the declaration page of your policy or inside the app on your phone. If you see any of these listed, chances are you or anyone in your household hasn’t been involved in any accident or reported any claim to your insurance company in the last three to seven years. If they aren’t there, you’ll probably see a mention or list of claims or accidents under the driving record portion of your policy.
But that still doesn’t answer your question: Why is the company charging for an accident that wasn’t your fault?
Insurers find out about previous claims or accidents through various reporting systems. Any time you report a claim to an insurance company, the details get passed on to a data gathering company. Sometimes the information gets transmitted in error. Insurance companies then buy back that data as a consumer report and match it to what they find on the DMV record. Often, the data doesn’t match up with the dates or locations listed on the DMV report or doesn’t exist in the consumer report at all.
In the case of the family member, he was driving a company truck. The commercial insurer covering the company benefited from the listing of the claim under its name, but the driver did not. Now, when the driver applies for personal auto insurance, he’s up against two problems. Personal auto insurance companies do not order commercial-based consumer reports, only personal auto policy data. And since his name was associated with the accident filed at the DMV, no supporting personal consumer matches up. Auto insurance companies then, by default, consider his accident as at-fault.
How can he resolve this matter and get his insurance to drop the accident down to non-chargeable? He must contact the insurance company directly or get the business he works for to request proof of not-at-fault. We refer to such a document in the insurance industry as a “Letter of Experience.” The letter of experience should list the date of the accident, who was driving, how much was paid out, and who they deemed as the at-fault driver. With that letter in hand, he can then forward a copy to his insurance agent (me), and I can submit it to his current personal auto insurer to have them remove the surcharge.
The moral to this long story is: if you are involved in an accident as the driver of a company vehicle, it would be a great idea to get proof you were not at-fault at the time of the accident. If you wait, human resource personnel may change, claims adjusters may not cooperate with you because you are not the insured, and if you leave the company, they might not be very helpful as you no longer work there. Besides needing the letter of experience for current and future insurance policies for the next seven years, you might need it while applying for a job to prove to a prospective employer, or their insurer, that you weren’t at-fault.
