The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has addressed questions from politicians on its climate data call, including which states have submitted data and which states are not participating.
The NAIC’s request for data from property insurers, which was launched last year, has been criticised by politicians for providing insufficient coverage across the US insurance industry and for lacking in transparency on who will contribute.
Earlier this year, states including Florida and Louisiana said they would not oblige their insurers to participate in the data call.
Last month, Democrat members of Congress and Senators including Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff, sent a letter to the Federal Insurance Office (FIO) director Steven Seitz and the NAIC’s president Andrew Mais, calling on the FIO to compel states not voluntarily participating in the data call to submit their data and publish the names of any states that refuse to participate.
In response, the NAIC said states are not submitting data, rather “insurers within the scope of the data call are submitting data directly to the NAIC”.
The data call “was specifically designed to focus on a particular set of companies relevant to every market across the country, and was never intended to require every state to sign on to be successful”.
The NAIC said 144 insurers are reporting data in all states in which they write. Another 270 insurers, outside the initial scope of the data call, are being asked to submit data by a particular state or states.
Furthermore, while there is no obligation to report for future years, the agreement between states and the NAIC does allow for subsequent data calls and “it is our expectation this will be an annual effort”.
The data call will gather over 70 distinct data elements across 40,000+ zip codes and is “by far the largest market intelligence data call we’ve undertaken”, the NAIC said.
