NAIC Panel Acts On Market Conduct Data Proposal

The annual statement is the most efficient vehicle for collecting data, according to NAIC President and Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger.

Using supplements to the annual statement to gather data will create uniformity and offer companies a chance to make a single filing rather than complying with multiple state filing requirements, Praeger said.

Filing one form rather than separate forms for 29 states makes “perfect sense,” said Jane Cline, NAIC vice president and West Virginia commissioner. “It is important not to back pedal but to move forward.”

Joel Ario, acting Pennsylvania insurance commissioner and a former Market Regulation Committee chair, oversaw initial work on the market conduct information filing issue several years ago.

Because Ohio is no longer the lead state on the issue, the NAIC needs to put a filing system in place quickly, so that there will not be any backward movement on the current work, Ario said.

When centralized market conduct data collection was first proposed as a pilot project, Ohio agreed to coordinate the project.

The state recently told other states it would step down from the role of market data collection project coordinator.

If there is backward movement, opponents of state regulation in Washington will use that to question how well state regulators are performing, Ario said.

Ario said he and other regulators would be open to hearing about specific concerns about confidentiality, but not general worries about the issue.

The information that is collected is 15 months old and therefore not likely to raise issues of competitive disadvantage, because the information is not real-time information, Ario said.

Kim Holland, Oklahoma insurance commissioner, suggested that identifying data clearly could help ameliorate insurers’ concerns about data being misinterpreted.