Most earthquake quake claims will be legit, say insurers

Photo / Greg Bowker

Christchurch earthquake-related insurance fraud is a likelihood but in times of emergency, companies should be more concerned with responding to the mountain of claims, an industry leader says.

Every year, insurers deal with $250 million worth of fraud. Insurance Council chief executive Chris Ryan said it was too early to estimate how big of a problem fraudulent earthquake claims were likely to be.

"Under normal circumstances fraud is quite high. People basically try out insurance companies quite often. For [the earthquake], I don't think fraud will be over and above what's happening. It'll be normal to slightly less than normal levels of fraud because people are stressed and they just want to get their lives back to normal."

Insurance companies were trying to expedite the process as quickly as they could, and hundreds of houses had been assessed for the 50,000 claims the industry had received, Mr Ryan said.

"You have to accept that the vast majority of claims are true but to be honest, dishonest claims may sneak through simply because of the pressure of numbers."

A small percentage of homeowners were likely to either claim for damages to their homes done prior to the earthquake or over-inflate contents claims.

Detecting those people came down to going through a claim line by line, Mr Ryan said.

"If you feel claims don't stack up, you send an expert out there to check."

But many more were likely to underestimate what their properties or contents were worth, Mr Ryan said, meaning good assessors were needed to make sure fair payment occurred.