NC insurance commissioner: No ‘magic bullet’ to solve insurance issues 

North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey told collision repairers and others associated with the industry last week that “nobody has a magic bullet” to improve insurance claims handling practices.

Causey and North Carolina Department of Insurance (NCDOI) Vehicle Towing, Recovery, and Repair Analyst Belinda Harris, and Regional Director Mike LaBrose shared what the NCDOI can and can’t do during the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) Board of Directors’ open meeting in Charlotte on April 21.

The panel also answered questions from audience members. Causey shared that he plans to run for re-election in 2028.

“It’s [insurance market] as bad now as it ever was, but the point I want to make is that no matter what insurance department it is, nobody has a magic bullet,” Causey said. “We’re not lawmakers, we’re regulators, but to get what you need, you have got to get the leadership in the legislature in your respective states to pass legislation on behalf of the consumer that gives those consumers strong consumer rights and protects the small business.”

Harris shared slides with the audience that list what the NCDOI can and cannot handle:

Jill Tuggle, executive director for the Auto Body Association of Texas, asked if a body shop can file a complaint with the DOI if it believes an insurance company steered a customer away from their business.

Harris said it would be up to the claimant to file it because they are the ones who heard the conversation and talked with the insurance company.

Belinda Harris

Tuggle followed up by asking how the DOI could establish guidelines for what is steering and what isn’t.

“Because at the shop level, we’re seeing some really blatant tactics that are still coming,” she said. “We’re getting pushback that it’s not technically steering.”

Harris answered, “That’s the biggest gray area, I believe, in the insurance industry.”

Causey added, “Insurance companies are experts at skirting state statutes. They know what the law is, but they’ll go right up to it or figure out a way to go around it. They’re really good at that, and we catch them sometimes. We have shops — auto glass shops and body shops — that record conversations from the insurance folks to the customer. It’s a tough one. We’ve gone back to the companies and said, ‘Look, we believe this is steering.’ And they said, ‘OK, we’ll just change our language.’ Well, how long are they going to change it? For 30 days, and then they’re back to it? We don’t know.

“Texas is like the majority of other states, where the insurance commissioner is appointed by the governor or appointed by something else. North Carolina is one of only 11 states that the insurance commissioner is elected by the whole state, just like the governor. I don’t work for the governor, I work with the governor, but the governor’s not my boss. I’m an independently elected state official. ”

He noted that Georgia, Mississippi, Delaware, Kansas, and California are some of the states that elect their insurance commissioners.

“They have much more stability in the insurance markets and insurance world,” Causey said. “I’m not advocating one way or the other, but that’s something that I think the people in each state could look at, and the legislators have to introduce that legislation. But there have been some states that have either gone from elected to appointed or appointed to elected.

“It’s not being talked about much, but it’s been talked about a lot nationally with the insurance situation because we [North Carolina] have one of the most healthy, stable insurance markets in the country. I believe it’s because if you look at the states where the people elect the insurance commissioner, I think, the consumers are better served… Most insurance commissioners try to operate in a nonpartisan manner, and we’re there to help people. The Department of Insurance is here to help, so if there’s something we can help you with, let us know.”

Causey clarified that even if shops are located in another state and need help, he would be happy to reach out to the commissioners in those states to see if they’ll help.

Tuggle: If you guys see repeat offenses or people who maybe change their language and then go back, are you keeping record of that and is there representation of that?

When asked if the NCDOI keeps records of insurance companies repeatedly changing policy language and/or being flagged for repeat offenses, Causey said very thorough records are kept about the number of complaints.

“This is important for every shop owner to know: if you keep hearing the same complaints about this particular company, it is real important that the claimant file a complaint with the Department of Insurance, because there may be a hundred complaints out there, but none of those complaints are filed with the Department of Insurance,” he said. “There’s no record of it, and the commissioners don’t have any ammunition.

“But if I’ve got a lot of complaints on one particular company, then I can go to that company, and we’d say, ‘Look, something’s not right.’ Every state does market conduct exams, and you can go in and put a company under examination. They don’t like that. We go pull their files and look at their claims and look for patterns. There are a lot of bad actors out there, and there’s a lot of fraud out there, but we need your help to go after it.”

How to access the examination reports on NCDOI’s website:

1. 1. Visit ncdoi.gov
   2. Choose “Insurance Industry”
   3. Scroll down to “Market Regulation”
   4. Scroll down to “Published Examination Reports”
   5. The reports are searchable by year and topic, such as property and casualty, life and health companies, etc., and can be downloaded in PDF format.
   6. After setting the search parameters, click “apply.” Doing so will pull up all of the reports published within those parameters.

In response to Causey’s position that complaints should come from consumers, SCRS Executive Director Aaron Schulenburg asked, “If you have a business who’s interacting with hundreds of consumers each month and can acknowledge patterns of behavior that cross from one consumer to the next, and those consumers may not have the appetite beyond getting their vehicle repaired, do you think there’s a potential that your division might miss some of the bad behavior that’s occurring that impacts consumers by not having an avenue for the professionals who are engaging with those policyholders and claimants to be able to report that behavior to them?”

LaBrose said it’s helpful to cite North Carolina General Statute 58-3-180, the consumer’s right to choose, when addressing concerns with claimant issues.

“When I was in agent services, we audited, and it’s so very helpful to have the general statute there available when a complaint is made,” he said. “Chapter 50-GA can be accessed on the internet. Just go to North Carolina General Statutes, download the whole Chapter 58, and then have it on your desktop and be able to key in certain words.”

Justin Lewis, [title], asked whether there is a formal rulemaking process or petition in North Carolina to update when a consumer or a trade association believes insurance rules and/or laws are outdated.

“We have to go through our legal team, the general counsel, and if there is something that is a loophole or that needs to be tightened up, most of the time it has to be done through the legislature,” Causey said. “But there are cases where the insurance commissioner… can go through their legal team, and say, ‘Look, we need to tighten this up. Let’s issue an administrative code, a bulletin, to the companies requiring this.’

“Every state has their own rules, but it has to be brought to somebody’s attention to find out.”

LaBrose noted that, based on his 18-plus-year career in the insurance industry, it’s all about shops building relationships with legislators in their districts.

“The legislature in my district is Speaker Destin Hall in Caldwell County. I can pick up the phone and give him a call,” he said. “You should have that type of relationship, if you know who your representative is, whether it’s a House rep or a Senate rep. That’s where it starts.

“It goes so much easier, as we’ve talked about, if you have concerns or potential legislation that you would like to see. It all boils down to relationships. I will say in this climate that we live in, in this world, everybody wants to escalate from zero to 10 in a snap of a finger. People are not, as a general rule, going to respond to that type of action. Sometimes it’s necessary, sometimes you can’t help it, but as a general rule, if you can work that relationship and try to not escalate something, and you can still get your point across, you can still get the claim settled, you can still get a settlement that’s achievable, then that’s the best way. It’s the hardest way. Building relationships is something hard to do.”

Causey added he’s noticed over the years that most insurance companies have gotten rid of their adjusters.

“They want you just to take pictures and send them in,” he said. “That’s something I’ve had issues with the insurance industry about and talk about it. They’re looking at it from a cost standpoint… It’s a problem.

“In this state and most other states, for every dollar we’re paying in insurance premiums, 20 to 25 cents is going just to cover fraud. Fraud and scams are everywhere… The insurance industry is going to have to make some changes. My issue is trying to get the insurance companies to be more fair and quit doing the low-ball estimates and quit trying to shave money off of total loss claims and things like this.”

Andrew Batenhorst, Pacific Collision Center body shop manager (California) and SCRS Board treasurer, said he often hears that adjusters say they can no longer pay for certain operations due to subrogation recovery.

“We’re finding that a lot of insurance carriers are using AI tools to do a very aggressive scrub of whatever demand they’re getting from the other carrier,” he said. “We’re seeing a change of behavior based on the top two or top one carrier in the country calling out the shots for basically everyone else. It starts to then put pressure downward on top of every other carrier. And before you know it, there’s a lot of similarities of what’s being denied and what’s not being covered, and that’s obviously then trickling down onto the consumer.”

He asked the panel if the NCDOI is working on regulation or trying to address or combat the issue that AI tools are so new that legislation on the books hasn’t caught up with some of that. LaBrose confirmed that the department is working on it.

“We’re trying to catch up to understand what AI is going to mean to the industry and the carriers,” he said. “The subrogation piece, that’s another frustrating piece that as an agent, when my client got in an accident and the other person was clearly at fault — the police, the crash report — said they were at fault and they went to file the claim on the other person’s insurance, automatically the other insurance says, ‘Well, just go ahead and file it on your insurance and we’ll just subrogate it.'”

LaBrose also said many mainline North Carolina carriers still provide people to talk to in claims handling; however, there are a lot of carriers starting to use AI more frequently.

“Just to be honest with you, it frustrates me,” he said. “I don’t like to talk to AI. I want to talk to somebody, but with the younger generation, they seem not to have that big of an issue with it.

“The customers, everybody’s, going to lose with that because no one wants to take responsibility for it. ‘Yeah, my carrier took care of it, and we did right by the customer,’ but it wasn’t right by the customer.”

He added that it’s probably not fair for body shops either because of subrogation, which he said is how supplement checks came about.

“I don’t like subrogation,” LaBrose said. “I know it’s necessary in certain situations, but it’s just being used too much in the industry. I think that’s hurting the consumer by having to pay their deductible upfront. They weren’t even at fault, and they may or may not get their deductible [back]… I know it does hurt the body shops with supplemental checks and the whole process of getting your money for services that you rendered. How do you get your money back in a timely fashion from the carrier when it’s in subrogation?

“Then you’ve got the insurance carriers themselves, the ones that paid it, they’re going to pay pennies on the dollar in order to get the claim settled. Everybody loses with that.”

He concluded that AI and subrogation are major issues that the DOI must face as an industry.

Images

Featured image: North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey speaks during the Society of Collision Repair Specialists Board of Directors’ open meeting on April 21, 2026, in Charlotte. 

(From left) Causey; Belinda Harris, North Carolina Department of Insurance (NCDOI) vehicle towing, recovery, and repair analyst; and Mike LaBrose, NCDOI regional director.

All photos taken by Lurah Lowery/Repairer Driven News