Ontario establishes Auto Insurance Anti-Fraud Task Force

Ontario’s newly created Auto Insurance Anti-Fraud Task Force will be examining the scope of auto insurance fraud in Ontario and is expected to make final recommendations to the government in Fall 2012.
The recommendations will address prevention, detection, investigation, enforcement and consumer education strategies around fraudulent auto insurance claims.
The government announced the mandate and composition of the task force steering committee on July 29.
The steering committee will produce a report outlining immediate action recommendations sometime during Fall 2011, the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO) says on its Web site.
The steering committee is expected to produce a final research report on auto insurance fraud in Ontario in Spring 2012. Final recommendations to the government will be made in Fall 2012, FSCO says.
The task force will do research in the following areas, among others:
•The nature and extent of criminal and opportunistic auto insurance fraud in Ontario.
•The financial cost of auto insurance fraud in Ontario, including the costs of criminal and opportunistic fraud in personal injury claims and fraud in non-personal injury coverages such as vehicle repair.
•The territorial distribution of fraud within Ontario (e.g. the incidence of fraud in the GTA compared with the incidence of fraud in other urban centres and rural areas).
•The extent of the migration of staged accident rings to Ontario from other jurisdictions and its costs and effects for Ontario’s drivers.
•The best anti-fraud practices in place in other jurisdictions.
Members of the steering committee are as follows:

Fred Gorbet (Chair)
Gorbet is the CIT chair in financial services and associate director of the financial services program at the Schulich School of Business at York University. From 1968-1992, Gorbet served in the federal government in a number of positions, including associate secretary to the Cabinet and deputy minister of finance.

George Cooke
Cooke is president and CEO of The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company. He is chair of the Ontario committee of the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) and served as a director of the IBC since 1992 (he was chair of the board from 2000-02).

Margaret Beare
Beare is a professor of Law and Sociology at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School. She is a former director of the Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption at Osgoode Hall Law School. She served 11 years with the department of the Solicitor General of Canada, including two years as director of police policy and research.

Bob Percy
Percy is deputy chief of the Halton Regional Police, responsible for the force’s operations portfolio, responsible for the oversight of all frontline and investigative policing.

James Daw
Daw is a business journalist writing in the field of personal finance, pensions, tax, insurance, business and the economy. Daw is a former Toronto Star personal finance columnist who has written extensively about the auto insurance system in Ontario.