Skip to main content
News

Why Do I Need an Insurance Audit?

How Sophisticated is Your Understanding of Insurance?

While insurance is a fundamental part of nearly every business, we find that it’s something very few business owners and senior managers are truly comfortable with. If you’re running a successful business, you likely have a sophisticated understanding of your company’s products, services, assets, leases, financial structure, client base, and regulatory oversight, not to mention the many other things that make your business successful. But if you’re a typical manager, you probably don’t understand your insurance as well as you understand the rest of your business.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Every company is different, even those operating in the same fields. Take pharmaceutical research, for example. A small, independent biotech startup may not invest in the most expensive diagnostic equipment; they might instead elect to send samples out to larger labs, or else use other analytical methods when available. On the other hand, a very large research facility might have multiple devices available, perhaps even with a staff dedicated exclusively to their upkeep and more advanced protocols. These two companies, in the same business, have very different exposures, creating different insurance and contractual needs.

Where We Come In

Most companies, especially smaller ones, don’t have full-time employees managing their insurance programs. In fact, the employee responsible for making a company’s insurance decisions is not usually an insurance expert. This can often make it difficult to determine whether a particular policy is truly necessary, or whether another one is properly designed. As a result, virtually all companies have insurance programs that are not optimized for what they do. Some might only have minor issues, such as unnecessary, overlapping coverage or unusually high deductibles, while others might have critical exposures that they aren’t even aware of, simply because it hasn’t occurred to them that such a particular risk existed.

Some of the Things We Look For

When we complete an insurance audit, we look at far more than just the policies in place – since our goal is to tailor your insurance program to your company, our first task is to learn everything we can about your business. Does your company handle physical assets, and thus require a traditional asset-based insurance solution? Or, does it have more of an intellectual property and data exposure, requiring a different type of insurance and risk-management treatment? Does your company provide services to others, on their sites, thus making you contractually responsible for their facilities and personnel? Are you susceptible to losses from past events, and if so, does your insurance address this?

 

There are many potential issues with company insurance programs. You can learn more about these potential issues, how they can affect your company, and how an insurance audit can address them here.