“The insurers had to write to all their customers to send them their quotes for terrorism insurance,” she said, “but they didnt even have systems to tell them who to write to or whether theyd already written to us.”

For example, she said her company received dozens of letters from the same insurer, “which came to our company without any attention line, or they went to the chairman, or to a location that the insurer happened to cover.” Many companies didnt even know that they should send the TRIA letter to the risk management department, Ms. Meltzer said.

“My CFO said if he got one more TRIA letter, he was going to hit somebody,” she recalled.

“I appreciate they were in a hurry to comply with the requirements of TRIA, but they knew what was coming,” Ms. Meltzer said. “They worked on TRIA for gods sake. Its what they wanted.”

She said these problems indicate just how bad the industry is with its systems and processing. “It was amazing watching companies scramble like that.”

Ms. Meltzer was president of the Risk and Insurance Management Society in 1998-1999. During her tenure, she pushed for improvements in the area of policy issuance.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, June 9, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.