by John Darer® CLU ChFC MSSC RSP CLTC
A multi-state examination into several large life insurance companies found that MetLife had not made sufficient effort to locate beneficiaries of life insurance policies. Insurance companies can easily find information about deceased policy owners through the Social Security Administration’s Death Master, and the investigation found that MetLife had failed to aggressively use the Master File, according to Nicholas John Jackson, an intermediary for Annapolis Missouri based Selling Your Structured Settlement, SYSS. SYSS compares the resulting $40 million settlement to "Redwood Down" and supports this with a link to a New York Times article by Mary Williams Walsh dated April 23, 2012. [see "MetLife Settles Claims on Benefits]
Walsh wrote that MetLife explained that because many of the people who bought the so-called industrial life policies (which it stopped selling in 1964) did so before the Social Security program was created, in 1935, no Social Security number was ever written on their policy and the master death index was not a good place to find out whether any of them had died. MetLife said that in the last few years, MetLife had been trying to cross-check the master death index with that block of policies once a year. The settlement calls for it to make those cross-checks once a month.
MetLife's total assets have grown almost 67% in the last 3 years See here.
When one compares $40 million to $819.6 billion it is clear that the mighty "Redwood" is standing, as it has since 1868. So current and prospective policyholders of MetLife can rest assured that there's enough money for the largest life insurance company in the United States to keep the Snoopy 2 (right) in the air AND to pay your claims.
Related reading
Structured Settlements 4Real® blog covered the related topic of retained asset accounts extensively, in 3 blog posts during July/ August of 2010.
Prudential Cleared NJ Regulators in Life Insurance Retained Asset Investigation August 17, 2010
American Council of Life Insurers on Retained Asset Accounts July 28, 2010
Life Insurance Company Retained Asset Accounts for Policy Death Benefits August 7, 2010
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