Risk Insider: Scott Clark

TRIA Inaction is ‘Disconcerting’

By: | December 18, 2014

Scott B. Clark is Risk and Benefits Officer at Miami-Dade County Public Schools. He can be reached at [email protected].

As a member of the Risk and Insurance Management Society’s (RIMS) External Affairs Committee, chair of RIMS Political Action Committee Risk Pac, and a former president of RIMS, I was very saddened to see that Congress left Washington without providing an extension to the Terrorism Risk and Insurance Act (TRIA).

It is even more disconcerting because there appeared to be a compromise in the works between the House of Representatives version and the Senate version, which would have extended the Federal backstop for six years.

RIMS has worked diligently with key members of Congress and other support organizations to clearly articulate the challenges that employers and their risk managers would face if a Congressional extension of TRIA did not occur prior to the deadline of December 31, 2014.

As the nation’s economy is gaining some momentum after the significant challenges of the worst recession since the 1929 Depression, subjecting the business community to the potential significant impact of policy cancellations for terrorism coverage for property coverage as well as workers’ compensation coverage is absolutely unnecessary and a dereliction of duty on the part of Congress not to have taken action on TRIA.

Businessweek has now written that there is a potential cancellation of Super Bowl XLIX as a result of the backstop not being extended.

Speaker Boehner has gone on record that Congress will fix this as soon as Congress gets back to work in the new year, potentially with a retroactive date.

All that is fine but the bottom line is that this should not have happened and it is unfortunate that politics trumps rational decision-making, thus putting businesses in the cross hairs of potentially having lapses in coverage, which is essential to good business operations.

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