In brief:
Prudential Insurance Co of America has agreed to pay $17 million as part of a multi-state agreement over death benefits when an insured person dies and no claim is filed.
The full story
The settlement was announced in Florida by insurance regulators and the state's attorney general. Prudential is in the process of building a program that matches death lists with policies and then attempts to match those with a beneficiary.
For the agreement to finalize, however, 20 states must sign the agreement by March 31 to provide timely death lists to the company. So far only 7 states have signed onto the plan.
The upgrade is part of Prudential's in-house updates to its system for electronically matching the Social Security death list with policies on record. Currently, that is done twice annually, but the company plans to update monthly instead.
Summing up
If 13 more states can sign on by the end of March, Prudential will have enough to justify costs to upgrade their system using state-issued death files on top of the Social Security updates, which are not always as timely.
