Message From The President (December 01, 2009)

You will be reading this message long after all the leaves have fallen; the poppies put away and Christmas will have come and gone! This fall was a very busy session for me as president of the Canadian Independent Adjusters’ Association, but most gratifying.

I attended the National Insurance Conference of Canada (NICC) with our first vice president, Mary Charman and what a tremendous event. Our association was very well received and recognized and as CIAA president, I am particularly pleased to be a member of the NICC advisory committee. In October, I met with Joel Baker, NICC chair to discuss next year’s program — the plan is for 2010 in Montral to include a claims focus!

A major CIAA initiative this year is a Creative Strategic Planning (CSP) session with the ultimate goal of reassessing the direction of our association. This project is well underway: with three surveys being delivered to the industry — members, non-member independent adjusters and various stakeholders. To date we have received a terrific response and are looking forward to reviewing the results in early December.

Our Creative Strategic Planning session in early December includes fifteen CSP committee members and also fifteen key stakeholders. We’ll start the session with Concerto Research’s presentation of our survey results, which will lead into a focus group. These two key events will kick off several days of planning, which will bring results in the form of key actionable plans to strengthen CIAA and the claims industry at large.

Survey results and actionable plans will be presented at CIAA’s mid-year meeting on Feb. 1, 2010. We have several key organizations and companies who are strongly supporting this initiative. Our sincere thanks to these supporters who are recognized in this issue of Claims Canada!

Our national executive committee members and regional presidents are all off to a good start this year. We have implemented some changes to include more developed mandates for each executive committee chair and a newly designed reporting template to help the regional president’s update national on their activities. Our intention is to have the executive committee chairs become part of the vehicle for implementing change over the coming years. We have an excellent group on board — please take the time to review who is involved and committing their volunteer time to the CIAA.

This month’s feature article is HST: Ontario and British Columbia sales tax harmonization. Much has been written regarding the impact, and there will be much more as we approach the deadline. As independent adjusters, we generally do not charge GST for our services, and that will not change with the HST. The impact we will feel is a slight increase in the cost of doing business as HST will apply to some supplies and services where only GST was previously charged. Adjusters will have to be aware of which rules apply, in what circumstances, to ensure proper indemnity of first party claims and no over payment on third party claims. It behooves all of us to ensure we are up to date on the changes and how it will affect the area of business we are responsible for: adjusters and business owners alike read the articles and educate yourselves. CIAA will bring you more learning opportunities as we get closer!

Till next month — be involved, be responsive, be professional!

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