WASHINGTON — Three more people have been nominated by President Barack Obama to be members of the board of the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers (NARAB II), including John M. Huff, NAIC president and Missouri insurance director.
The most recent nominations bring the total number of appointees to 10, which is the number needed to constitute a quorum and allow an agency that the industry has been trying to create for decades can soon begin to operate. Other nominations were made in January and April.
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NARAB II is intended to streamline the non-resident producer licensing process. It will serve as a central clearinghouse allowing an insurance producer licensed in his/her home state to sell, solicit or negotiate in every other state in which the producer intends to do business, provided the producer is licensed for those lines of business in his/her home state, and pays the state’s licensing fee.
“Now that there’s a quorum and 10 of the 13 have been named, we hope that the Senate will be able to confirm them soon,” said Joel Wood, senior vice president of government affairs for the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers.
Wood said there is a streamlined process for confirmation, and now “it is just a matter of getting on the Senate calendar.”
Wood said the background checks and hurdles for presidential appointments were “onerous and cumbersome, but the group of nominees looks great and diverse.”
Wood added that, to date, there have only been informal conversations among some of the nominees. “Hopefully they’ll be able to get together this fall,” he said.
He said the first order of business will be establishment of bylaws and beginning to figure out a funding mechanism. NARAB II was enacted into law by President Obama’s signature in Jan. 2015.
“We’ve always believed it would take a couple of years of establishing an infrastructure and establishing membership criteria,” Wood said. But, he noted, “it, took near a quarter century to pass the thing,” adding that the CIAB formed its first task force to work on interstate nonresident licensure in 1933.
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