R in Insurance: Presentations are online

The programme and the presentation files of the first R in Insurance conference have been published on GitHub.

Front slides of the conference presentations

Additionally to the slides many presenters have made their R code available as well:

• Alexander McNeil shared the examples of the CreditRisk+ model he presented.
• Lola Miranda made a Windows version of the double chain-ladder package DCL available via the Cass knowledge web site.
• Alessandro Carrato's 1-year re-reserving code is hosted on the ChainLadder project web site.
• Giorgio Spedicato's life contingencies package is on CRAN already.
  
• Simon Brickman and Adam Rich's HTML presentation and underlying R code for Automated Reporting is included in the GitHub repository.
  
• Stefan Eppert pointed out that KatRisk published an illustrative catastrophe model in R.
• Hugh Shanahan's code to integrate R with Azure for high-throughput analysis is on GitHub.

Thanks again to all the presenters who have helped to make the event a success.

Hopefully, we see you again next year!

Agent charged with theft and forgery; collected commissions for fictitious customers

A former Vancouver insurance agent has been charged with theft and forgery for allegedly collecting about $15,000 in commissions by creating fictitious applicants for insurance policies.

Julie Anne Goss, 43, an independent agent for AFLAC, was arraigned last week in Clark County Superior Court.

The scam came to light after the owner of a restaurant in Battle Ground, Wash. told AFLAC that she’d received premium bills for two “employees” that had never worked there. 

AFLAC investigated, and it turned out that Goss wrote dozens of policies for 15 people that either weren’t employees at the named businesses or apparently didn’t exist. In other cases, she wrote policies for real employees, but they said they hadn't applied for the coverage.

In each case, Goss stood to get a commission for the policy. All told, the investigator found, between August 2010 and January 2011, Goss wrote 91 fraudulent insurance policies and collected more than $15,000 in commissions for them.

The company canceled its contract with Goss in March 2011 and reported the matter to our Special Investigations Unit. After investigating further, we revoked Goss’ insurance license in January 2012. The charges against her were filed in late June.
If you suspect insurance fraud and you live in Washington state, please report it.