Insurers fined for complaint tampering

Insurance firms Direct Line and Churchill have been fined £2.17m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for tampering with customer complaint files.

More than half of the 50 cases that were submitted for inspection by the FSA were doctored, according to the financial body, including forged staff signatures on seven documents.

The two insurers were asked to submit the paperwork in 2009, as part of the regulator’s drive to improve complaints handling. 

The BBC claims that staff were threatened with disciplinary action if there were shortcomings in their complaints procedures, before the tampering occurred. 

The FSA says the changes to the documents were “purely clerical” and “minor in nature”, but that the firms had still made a “serious breach of the rules”. 

The British taxpayer will effectively be footing the bill for the multi-million pound FSA fine, however, as it now owns the insurers’ parent company, the Royal Bank of Scotland.

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