His viewpoint was at sharp variance from that of Audrey Samers, deputy superintendent and general counsel for the New York State Insurance Department. "I think what the insurance industry suffers from is this informality," she said.

According to Mr. Sills, "It was useful in the past when [a broker representative] said, 'This is what these people are paying now. Is this something you can be helpful on?'"

He said that after Oct. 14, 2004 when New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer unveiled charges that Marsh brokerage engaged in bid-rigging with insurers in exchange for hidden fees, it did not introduce any new ethics to the business. Mr. Sills said it had brought about subtle changes to informal day-to-day dealings between brokers and insurers.

Mr. Sills and Ms. Samers spoke on a panel that included a claims professional and two lawyers. The announced goal of the ethics session was to help professionals understand how to manage their careers in the wake of Mr. Spitzer's brokerage suit.

"The name of this panel is a bit of a misnomer," Mr. Sills said. "The ethics that existed years ago still apply today. I don't think there's anything new here," he said.

"When you read about some of the things that have been taking place, I don't think anybody would suggest that they were acceptable under the old ethics," he said, explaining that because brokers engaged in steering activities and other "things they shouldn't have been doing, that doesn't mean that new rules suddenly apply."

Ms. Samers told attendees that a career in insurance remains an honorable one in spite of the Spitzer revelations.

"The commissioner [Howard Mills] has been very clear [in] making public statements that the whole industry is not corrupt," she said, advising that the activities that regulators are looking at involve conflicts of interest and failure to disclose information.

"If you enter a deal and you think that if it saw the light it wouldn't be consummated--or a regulator would be upset--that's something, when you go home at night, you should think about what you're doing," she advised.

Ms. Samers found herself at odds with Mr. Sills after he spoke about the more formal everyday dealings between brokers and insurers he's witnessed.

She reported that the current focus of the department--on probes into finite transactions (which differ from traditional reinsurance deals in that risk transfer is more limited)--highlights the lack of formality. "The majority of companies don't have written policies on evaluating risk transfer in insurance contracts," she said.

She continued, "Going back to the World Trade Center, there was never an insurance policy" in place.

"The insurance industry is notorious for its informality. And I think a little more formality would be helpful."

Mr. Sills, speaking about less formal days when a broker might reveal to a carrier what a client was currently paying for insurance, said time and effort was saved when such information was available.

If the carrier being approached was not interested in writing the risk, given that information, then brokers didn't have to bother sending submissions to the uninterested carriers, and the carriers didn't have to spend days underwriting the risks, he said.

And brokers could honestly tell clients that they approached carriers, indicating which might be interested in writing the coverage and which were not, when seeking the client direction on how to proceed with the bidding process.

"The elimination of a useful informality in the business" is particularly apparent for larger brokers who "are playing much more to a script" which "has stifled the flow of the way things work," he said.

He continued: "We're not seeing much of a change from the smaller brokers. In fact, to listen to some of the smaller brokers, you would think they're not reading the papers."

Once things start to settle down, he predicted the business will start to flow more normally.