The New York State Department of Financial Services is teaming up with New York State Police to implement aspects of the auto insurance changes pushed by Gov. Kathy Hochul as part of the state budget.
The partnership is focused on cracking down on staged car crashes as part of Hochul’s effort to reduce auto insurance premiums in part by strengthening fraud enforcement.
Officials say the collaboration will allow DFS, which houses much of the state’s expertise in financial crimes, to share information and detection techniques with officers responding to collisions in real time. The effort included a symposium at which DFS and State Police officials led training for 270 officials across 50 state, local and federal agencies.
“They can then go back to their homes and share their knowledge directly with the front-line road troopers, who will then have an impact on how these cases are prosecuted,” said Milton Yu, deputy superintendent for insurance fraud at the New York State Department of Financial Services.
Kurt Strassberger, a senior investigator with the State Police Financial Crimes Unit, told Spectrum News 1 that front-line troopers and other law enforcement officers will use the training as a first line of defense when they arrive at the scene of a crash to determine if fraud could be a factor.
It is their job to spot suspicious aspects of how a crash occurred or identify changing or inconsistent accounts from one of the parties, in an environment where a potential victim may be too overwhelmed to fully process what happened.
“Most citizens who get into a car accident, it’s a traumatic event for them. They may not be able to see the signs of someone trying to get away with some kind of scam or fraud against them,” Strassberger said. “If troopers can arrive at a scene and look at the scene from a place of not being stressed out or having just been in a car accident, they can see if the indices are there to lead them down a path to say ‘this car accident could be suspicious.’”
The partnership does not stop with more informed traffic enforcement. State Police will also establish a team that will use information gathered on the front lines to help build cases with assistance from DFS.
“It will be a seven-person unit that will be made up of a senior investigator and six investigators who will team up with the Department of Financial Services to investigate this,” Strassberger said.
During the budget process, lawmakers questioned how Hochul’s team could guarantee that the changes would reduce rates. They also raised concerns about limiting the ability of individuals who are mostly at fault for a crash to seek damages without such a guarantee. In addition to the fraud-fighting aspects of the package, the final deal included measures intended to ensure insurance companies pass savings from the changes along to policyholders.
Yu declined to predict whether the partnership and increased enforcement will produce a measurable increase in arrests and prosecutions involving staged car crashes, but told Spectrum News 1 that he is confident the plan will produce results.
“Sharing our knowledge and sharing our resources, there will be arrests in various jurisdictions — New York State Police, upstate, downstate,” he said. “There will be arrests.”