Canadian drivers in British Columbia will need to wait a little bit longer to receive their money.
Although the checks were supposed to already have been mailed to auto insurance customers of ICBC in British Columbia, Canada, who had been found to be paying too much for their policies over the last few years, it seems that there has been a delay in the process.
It has been discovered that the money hasn’t yet been sent out, after all, so customers will need to keep waiting.
According to the staff at ICBC, the auto insurance company is still waiting for two external reviews to be completed in order to be able to write the checks in the correct amounts and send them out to the customers who had overpaid. Those external reviews had been scheduled to be completed by the middle of June. Clearly, that time has come and gone. That said, the insurer is assuring its customers that as soon as it has the data from the audit, the checks will, indeed, be in the mail.
The auto insurance refunds from ICBC are the result of an audit that was ordered by the Transportation Minister.
The Transportation Minister, Todd Stone, ordered that an audit be conducted, back in April. In response, ICBC promised that it would have the situation resolved within a span of three months. It appears as though the insurance company had underestimated the amount of time that would be required in order to complete the necessary reviews and to produce the refund checks for the customers who had been paying too much.
It is estimated that there were approximately 40,000 insurance policy holders who had been paying too much every year for their optional coverage. At the same time, though there were another 58,000 who had not been paying enough for this same protection.
It has been estimated that the cost of resolving this accounting error from the auto insurance company – including the audit, the reviews, and the refunds to the customers who had been paying too much for their coverage, among other costs – is about $39 million.