Post-Loss Damage Assessment and Business Recovery Management: Tornadoes

Marsh USA

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Published: 04-Apr- 2012 | Product Category: Claims, Property Insurance, Risk Consulting | Comments: 0

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Recovery from a catastrophic event such as a tornado can be essential to your company’s finances, operations, and overall success.

Marsh Risk Consulting’s Forensic Accounting and Claims Services (FACS) Practice can help your company—no matter the industry—work through the vast number of claims-related issues that may follow a tornado. Our team of forensic accounting and claims professionals can respond almost anywhere in the world within 48 hours of a loss event to provide you with proactive, on-the-ground support to help manage the crisis. We offer the claims leadership and other resources useful in the wake of a tornado or other catastrophic event to help you mitigate your losses, focus your attention on your employees and community, and achieve a timely recovery and return to business.

Catastrophic Event Insurance Claims

A severe tornado can have far-reaching implications if your company does business in an affected region—whether physically located there or reliant on it for a supply of inputs, goods, or services. We can help manage your insurance and other claims so you can focus on running your business and assisting your people. Our services include post-event loss analysis of:

Property damage
Extra expense
Business interruption
Contingent business interruption
Service interruption
Supply chain disruption

FACS supports its work with two powerful tools to assist in expediting the recovery of your claim. FACSconnect and FACSdb are both highly customizable, easy-to-use systems that provide quick and secure online access to project information—including control over access privileges based on the level of involvement of each user—helping you to communicate and share critical information with insurers and adjusters. FACSconnect is a web-portal that allows users to share information, manage documents from start to finish, and review and provide comments. FACSdb is a robust, database tool that compiles, manages, and distributes large amounts of claim data efficiently and accurately.

Claims Project Management and Claims Engineering

Large casualty and property losses following a tornado can be extremely complex from a data as well as a stakeholder standpoint. Complex management issues may exceed the scope of your resources and capabilities, particularly if the tornado occurred in a location where you are not familiar with local regulations, procedures, and customs.

FACS claims project managers travel to the loss sites worldwide and assist in managing clients’ claim processes with stakeholders, including home office and local personnel, repair contractors, and loss adjusters. They can provide timely claims process progress reports and identify critical claims issues to be resolved – potentially before they develop into challenges that could delay the recovery.

Additionally, FACS can provide claims engineers and other experts to help establish the scope and values of property damage. These experts can separate the tornado damages from maintenance or related repair upgrades, which may or may not be insurance recoverable. Our claims engineers work with you to help address issues such as code upgrades, changes in technologies, and actual versus hypothetical baseline schedule analysis, and to identify damage scope issues that may not be evident to your insurer or the adjustment team. These efforts can help improve recovery efforts and reduce losses, allowing you to dedicate resources to the well-being of your employees and to resuming operations.

FACS Personnel

FACS is part of Marsh Risk Consulting’s Financial Advisory Services’ multi-disciplinary team of more than 200 professionals and administrative personnel worldwide. Our team brings global insight to local challenges, using consistent protocols and practices for post-loss analysis, claims project management, and claims engineering. FACS senior practitioners have spent an average of 20 years in forensic accounting and claims services, with extensive experience in insurance loss accounting, valuation, and insurance policy formats and requirements. FACS clients also have access to Marsh’s extensive capabilities in insurance policy coverage interpretation and claims advocacy. Our reputation for integrity with insurers and familiarity with the adjustment process provide a distinct advantage to our clients in helping to reduce the time for receipt of settlement.

The experts in our practice have diverse backgrounds as:

Certified public accountants/chartered accountants
Forensic accountants/certified fraud examiners
Professional engineers/forensic engineers
Insurance claims specialists/former insurance adjusters

Marsh Risk Consulting’s FACS professionals have helped clients recover from catastrophic events including:

Tornadoes in United States (Spring 2010 and 2011)
Earthquakes in Solomon Islands (2007); Chile and Haiti (2010); and New Zealand and Japan (2011)
Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004)
Typhoon Saomai and Tropical Cyclone Monica (2006)
Flooding in Jakarta (2007); Queensland and U.S. Midwest and South (2010 and 2011); and Thailand (2011)
Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne (2004); Katrina, Rita, Wilma (2005); Dolly, Gustav, Ike (2008); and Irene (2011)