Driven by an annual fraud loss of $30 billion, the nation's property and casualty insurance companies are taking aggressive action to attack this problem based on a two-year, industry-wide review of their fraud fighting efforts, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).

They said that while individual insurance carriers continue to refine and expand their aggressive anti-fraud processes into their claim-handling procedures, today's more sophisticated criminals create a special challenge. Fraudsters are much more insidious in that they will simultaneously target numerous companies with multiple fraudulent claims generating millions of dollars in bogus payments. This kind of criminal enterprise, the NICB says, requires more than an individual company is able to withstand.

It is against that backdrop that over the last two years various committees were created and staffed with industry professionals charged with identifying weak spots in existing fraud-fighting efforts. These groups recently completed their work and found that the industry's approach to fraud was fragmented and inadequate. While there are isolated examples of effective anti-fraud programs, the NICB says that a nationwide, coordinated effort on multiple fronts is necessary to reduce this costly economic problem.