INSURANCE & CLAIM REVIEW

Accumyn prepared a detailed damage analysis for an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who was severely injured after being struck by a bus while attempting to cross a downtown intersection.   The testimony of a medical expert established that the injuries sustained from the accident hastened a pre-existing kidney disease, requiring a premature kidney transplant and reducing the individual’s life expectancy.

Accumyn projected long-term growth for future medical costs and wages from federal government agencies.   Accumyn also established the individual’s pre-injury earning capacity and applicable income tax rates and deductions, factoring in the employer’s cost for applicable fringe benefits. Finally, Accumyn calculated the amount necessary to pay future income taxes on the interest earned from the anticipated damage award.

Accumyn audited the internal control policies of an independent refiner and marketer of petroleum products (the “Company”), operating several refineries in the United States, to determine if its senior management breached the Company’s policy on extending credit.   The Company’s senior management, pursuant to internal control policies and procedures, extended credit to a wholesale customer on an open account basis based on letters of credit the customer provided as collateral and statements made by the Company’s external auditors.

After analyzing the roles and responsibilities of the Company’s management and its external auditors in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Accumyn determined that it was not the role of the Company’s external auditors to determine the credit limit for customers, but the role of the Company’s management, who as a result of failing to adhere to its own internal controls, caused the Company to sustain a significant loss from bad debt.   Accumyn ultimately determined that the letters of credit were not valid; were issued several years after the customer’s credit balance had already exceeded the Company’s internal credit limit and the authority of its senior management; and that the Company’s senior management failed to follow its own internal control policies and procedures as it related to verifying customer collateral.

An Accumyn expert provided in-depth analysis and critique of an apartment owner’s claim that a hail storm which purportedly had caused more than one million dollars damage to the property. The property owner claimed a total loss of all of the roofs, awnings and HVAC units. The plaintiff’s experts calculated the roofing values with very little depreciation and no allowance for any preexisting issues. John used historical aerial photography as well as historical weather data and other documents in the file to establish a proper valuation for the damage. Historical photography showed that the roofs had been in place for far longer than their useful lives and that even the poorly applied patches were more than ten years old. Physical damage to the rooftop HVAC units was not consistent and based upon the ages of the units, a window of time in which the damage must have occurred was established. Historical weather data showed that not only had the current storm only skirted the property, several previous storms had directly impacted the property and the dates of these storms correlated with the physical damage observed. The opposing expert provided a timeline that included the touchdown of a tornado several miles away as well as a 71mph gust of wind recorded at a nearby airport at around the same time the damage was reported to have occurred. Although the opposing expert’s sequence of events seemed to support the damage, it had not been looked at in detail. John reviewed the data and discovered that the opposing expert was using the time of loss provided by the owner, which was in Central Daylight Time, the weather observations from the local airport which were on Central Standard Time, and National Weather Service Data which was on Greenwich Mean Time. When John adjusted the times to one standard, it became apparent that the opposing expert had mistakenly sampled data from two different and unrelated storms and tried to interpolate the weather conditions at the subject property based on this flawed methodology. When confronted with John’s findings, he agreed the basis for his opinion was flawed. A favorable settlement was reached for the defendant.