Post-Loss Damage Assessment and Business Recovery Management: Hurricanes

Recovery from a catastrophic event such as a hurricane can be essential to your company’s finances, operations, and overall success. Marsh Risk Consulting’s Forensic Accounting and Claims Services (FACS) Practice can help your company – no matter the industry – work through the numerous claims-related issues that may follow a hurricane.

Our team of forensic accounting and claims professionals can respond almost anywhere in the world within 48 hours of a loss event to provide you with on-the-ground support to help manage the crisis.

After major hurricanes such as Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Ike, and Irene, and Superstorm Sandy, our consultants prepared hundreds of complex claims totaling billions of dollars. We provided the claims leadership and other resources needed to help our clients mitigate their losses, focus their attention on their employees and community, and achieve a timely recovery and return to business. In the wake of a hurricane or similar catastrophic event, FACS can help you meet your post-loss recovery objectives.

Catastrophic Event Insurance Claims

Hurricanes can have far-reaching implications if your company does business in an affected region — whether physically located there or reliant on it for a supply of inputs, goods, or services. We can help manage your insurance and other claims, so you can focus on running your business and assisting your people.

Our services include post-event loss analysis of:

• Property damage.
• Extra expense.
• Business interruption.
• Contingent business interruption.
• Service interruption.
• Supply chain disruption.

FACS uses two powerful, proprietary tools to assist in expediting your claim recovery: FACSconnect and FACSdb are highly customizable, easy-to-use systems that provide quick and secure online access to project information — including control over access privileges based on each user’s level of involvement — helping you to communicate and share critical information with insurers and adjusters.

The FACSconnect web portal enables users to share information, manage documents from start to finish, and review and provide comments. The FACSdb database helps you compile, manage, and distribute large amounts of claim data efficiently and accurately.

Claims Project Management and Claims Engineering

Large casualty and property losses following a hurricane can be extremely complex from a data and stakeholder standpoint. Complex management issues may exceed the scope of your resources and capabilities, particularly if the hurricane occurred in a location where you are unfamiliar with local regulations, procedures, and customs.

FACS claims project managers travel to loss sites worldwide and assist in managing clients’ claim processes with stakeholders, including home office and local personnel, repair contractors, and loss adjusters. They can provide timely claims status reports and identify critical claims issues— so you can resolve them before they develop into challenges that could delay recovery.

Additionally, FACS can provide claims engineers and other experts to help establish the scope and values of property damage. These experts can separate hurricane damages from maintenance or related repair upgrades, which may or may not be insurance recoverable. Our claims engineers work with you to help address issues such as code upgrades, changes in technologies, and actual versus hypothetical baseline schedule analysis, and to identify damage-scope issues that may not be evident to your insurer or the adjustment team. These efforts can help improve recovery efforts and reduce losses, enabling you to dedicate resources to the well-being of your employees and to resuming operations.

FACS Personnel

FACS is part of Marsh Risk Consulting’s Financial Advisory Services’ (FAS) multidisciplinary team of more than 200 professionals and administrative personnel worldwide. Our team brings global insight to local challenges, using consistent protocols and practices for post-loss analysis, claims project management, and claims engineering.

Our senior practitioners have spent an average of 20 years in forensic accounting and claims services, with extensive experience in insurance loss accounting, valuation, and insurance policy formats and requirements. Our clients also have access to Marsh’s extensive capabilities in insurance policy coverage interpretation and claims advocacy. Our reputation for integrity with insurers and familiarity with the adjustment process provide a distinct advantage to our clients in helping to reduce the time for receipt of settlement.

FACS experts have diverse backgrounds as:

• Certified public accountants/chartered accountants.
• Forensic accountants/certified fraud examiners.
• Professional engineers/forensic engineers.
• Insurance claims specialists/former insurance adjusters.

FACS professionals have helped clients recover from catastrophic events including:

• Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dolly, Gustav, Ike, Irene, and Odile.
• Superstorm Sandy.
• Typhoon Saomai and Tropical Cyclone Monica.
• Flooding in Jakarta, Queensland, US Midwest and South, and Thailand.
• Earthquakes in Solomon Islands, Chile, Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan.