The irony of it all! From the AFR:
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has been cleared of “systemic” problems in its life insurance business CommInsure, with a report by Deloitte finding it did not have a culture of deliberately avoiding or delaying claims to its customers.
The report was commissioned by CommInsure in response to accusations it had delayed payments to terminally ill customers, pressured doctors to change medical opinions and relied on out-of-date definitions of medical conditions such as heart attacks to avoid claims.
The Deloitte report, which reviewed more than 800 declined claims, “did not identify any systemic issues relating to historically declined claims”. Just nine customers have had benefits paid or increased as a result of the review, about 1 per cent of those examined, while a further 11 cases are being reassessed.
Australia’s last journalist standing, Adele Ferguson, is not impressed:
There’s an old saying that you get what you pay for, and in CBA’s case it paid Deloitte to “independently” investigate its life insurance division and received a report that found no systemic issues or misconduct.
Deloitte was appointed to investigate bombshell allegations made by CommInsure’s former chief medical officer that the life insurer was putting profits before people.
Its conclusion was that it “did not identify any systemic issues relating to historically declined claims and did not identify any evidence that the current and planned improvements to the claims handling processes are designed in a way that could systemically deliver poor customer outcomes.”
It examined 797 declined claims, which represents 20 per cent of denied claims, and “each sampled declined claim was assessed using a process designed by Deloitte with the objective of establishing whether the claim was declined in accordance with the procedures and processes in operation by CommInsure at the time of the decline”.
From this 41 claims were identified and referred to the life insurer to undertake a reassessment of the initial decision to decline the claim.
But it didn’t interview the customers or their families. Instead it relied on the files.
…Some would argue that the Deloitte report was a whitewash and sanitisation on what happened. If that’s the case APRA has let them get away with it. APRA recently stated that it was “satisfied that the reviews are robust, complete and independent”.
In the past year Fairfax Media has received hundreds of emails from aggrieved life insurance customers, including CommInsure, many with compelling and disturbing stories of their treatment. It is hard to reconcile their concerns with the report presented by Deloitte. Perhaps that’s because nobody asked them.
CBA paying someone to clear it of systemic corruption…is this a Kafka novel?
Another job well done at APRA and the Do-nothing Malcolm government. Get to work Anna Bligh and Mike Baird. Plenty of good news here for customers.
