Federal Insurance Office to Hold First Meeting

March 18, 2012 by Jeff Jeffrey

The Federal Advisory Committee on Insuranceis set to hold its first meeting in Washingtonon March 30, according to an announcement placed in the federal register. The meeting, which will be held at the Treasury Department, comes as the insurance industry anxiously awaits the release of a highly anticipated report on the U.S. insurance market that was originally set to come out in January.

The committee, which was created by the Dodd-Frank Act to provide advice to the Federal Insurance Office, will be fielding comments from the public and from the 15 members of the committee on issues it should take up, said Jim Brown, senior policy adviser to the FIO. “The meeting is designed to be an update on FIO activity,” Brown said.

The meeting will be attended by members of the committee, seven of whom are state insurance commissioners. The commissioners include Pennsylvania Commissioner Michael Consedine, Virginia Commissioner Jacqueline Cunningham; New York Superintendent of Financial Services Benjamin Lawsky; Connecticut Commissioner Thomas Leonardi; Oregon Insurance Administrator Theresa Miller; Montana Commissioner and State Auditor Monica Lindeen; Washington, D.C. Commissioner Bill White.

It is unclear whether FIO Director Michael McRaith will attend the meeting. McRaith hosted the first FIO conference at Treasury in December (Best’s News Service, Dec. 9, 2011).

What is not on the committee’s agenda is the the long-awaited FIO report to Congress on ways to modernize the U.S. insurance industry, Brown said. The report is expected to touch on a number of closely watched issues, including the role of the FIO in the existing state-led system for regulating insurance, what changes the current system may need and how the United States plans to interact on the international stage as Europe and other regions of the world work to enact new regulatory schemes.

McRaith has said in past public appearances that the report would be released by the end of January. But FIO backed away from those claims, saying in early February it would be “several weeks” before the report would be released (Best’s News Service, Feb. 2, 2012).

To date, more than 150 comment letters have been submitted to the FIO.

It is expected to touch on a number of closely watched issues, including the role of the FIO in the existing state-led system for regulating insurance, what changes the current system may need and how the United States plans to interact on the international stage as Europe and other regions of the world work to enact new regulatory schemes.

Meanwhile, the FIO is facing questions about its constitutionality from Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John Doak. During a recent meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Doak told Best’s News Service he has asked the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office to investigate whether the FIO is constitutional. Doak said the FIO, which was created under the Dodd-Frank Act, may not be in line with the McCarren-Ferguson Act of 1945, which granted the authority to regulate insurance to the states (Best’s News Service, March 3, 2012).

(By Jeff Jeffrey, Washington Correspondent: jeff.jeffrey@ambest.com)

Originally Posted at InsuranceNewsNet on March 15, 2012 by Jeff Jeffrey.