Reinsurance Focus

The end of the state legislative season has been dominated by developments regarding captive insurers, although there have been a few other interesting developments as well.

• Louisiana has entered the captive insurer arena with a statute, SB 150, providing for the formation and operation of domestic captive insurance companies (effective January 1, 2009).
• Hawaii has amended its already established captive structure by enacting a bill (S 3023), which we previously reported, to provide for Special Purpose Financial Captive Insurance Companies, effective July 1, 2008.
• The Utah Insurance Department has proposed an amendment to its captive insurer regulations, proposed regulation R590-238, relating to the financial, reporting, record-keeping and other requirements for captive insurance companies. The comment period for this proposed regulation ends August 14, 2008; no hearing has yet been set.

In the non-captive area, the New York Insurance Department has issued two interesting opinions, one stating that a licensed insurance broker may compensate a non-licensee for referrals made to the broker, and another providing that an insurer may not pay an insurance commission to an entity which is not licensed and appointed as an insurance agent or broker.

The US Congress has entered the reinsurance regulation arena, considering H.R. 6213, which, if enacted, would establish the Reinsurance International Solvency Standards Evaluation Board, which would be charged “to evaluate the reinsurance supervisory systems of the States of the United States and jurisdictions outside the United States to determine, on a uniform basis, whether such systems provide adequate capital and risk management standards and an acceptable level of prudential supervision over their domiciled reinsurers.”

This post written by Rollie Goss.