I think the best way is to give a very brief scenario and show you why we support this.
Here's a scenario that we've run into several times. We have a left-turn situation in front of what seems to be an innocent vehicle. The other vehicle turns in front, and there's a collision. There is not significant damage, just bumper damage to the front of this so-called innocent vehicle. The driver says there are three occupants in the vehicle. In reality—and this is what we're going to get to, these are what we call jump-ins—they weren't in the vehicle at the time the collision took place.
Keeping in mind that the vehicle making the left turn is usually presumed to be at fault, the adjuster now receives this claim and does what we call a Carfax or AutoPlus report, where they're looking into a general history of the driver and vehicle that they insure, and he would contact IBC. They'd find out from that information that this driver and the vehicle were involved in a previous collision. It does identify the other insurer as well in those public reports. What that information has that they're not able to get to yet is that the other insurer also had a left-turn situation with multiple occupants in this vehicle.
Now, this accident happened late at night in a quiet neighbourhood, obviously at an intersection, and there were no witnesses. All three occupants were claiming soft tissue injury, but they didn't report it at the scene of the accident so the police didn't attend.
Under the current law, the adjuster obviously can't contact the other insurer to find out the facts of the other collision, so they're in the dark at this point. In the meantime, the claim starts getting paid and the occupants receive weekly income disability payments. They attend rehab facilities for extensive treatment, all of them usually receiving the same type of extensive treatment of physiotherapy, massage therapy, or chiropractic. At the same time that these bills are building up, the body shop is now doing the repairs to a vehicle that could very well have been previously repaired in the other accident.
It's reported to IBC at this point by the insurer just to let us know that they have some concerns, but the other party looks at fault. They can't contact the other insurer, so they start payments.
We support the bill because if the bill were passed, it would allow the insurer of this vehicle to contact the other insurer. They would find out some of the scenarios, that the same scenario existed with the same service suppliers: they used the same rehab facility, the same body shop, everything was virtually the same. This accident even took place in the same area.
What I'm getting into is an identified social network. It creates linkages among the possible participants in the suspected fraud, but because they couldn't contact the other insurer, because they didn't want to be found to be in bad faith, they started payment. They would have informed IBC, and we would get to it at some point.
The problem that exists here is that by the insurer contacting the other insurer immediately when they had these red flags coming up, they could quickly ascertain that this is a very suspicious situation, and they're in a position to at least stop payment and deny the claimant, stop the bleeding. With the way things stand right now, because they don't want to be accused of bad faith, they start payments right away.
Finally, just to give you an idea of how serious this is in the province of Ontario, the Insurance Bureau of Canada has the statistics that the average accident benefits payment per person in Ontario is $31,785. This is the staged collision capital of Canada, right here in the GTA. The average in Atlantic Canada for accident benefits is $8,668, and in Alberta it's $3,766.
A major problem that exists here is the identity theft we're seeing with service suppliers. That's a key reason these individuals get these accident benefits forms submitted to the insurers; there's a lot of forgery going on.