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State and regional associations—that together represent more than 2,000 body shops—participated in the sixth annual “Affiliate Leadership Conference” organized by the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) and held near Chicago in mid-September.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

SCRS Chairman Aaron Clark said the event is designed to help the national association gather input from its state affiliates on its direction and efforts, as well as to help those groups work with one another and with the national organization.

The affiliate groups reported on their recent and upcoming legislative efforts, their interactions with shop and insurer regulators, and other activities and issues in which they have recently been involved.

In Montana this past spring, for example, Governor Brian Schweitzer signed into law a bill, sponsored by the Montana Collision Repair Specialists, that prohibits a insurer from “unilaterally disregard(ing) a repair operation or cost identified by an estimating system” that the insurer and shop have agreed to use to determine the cost of repair.

Bruce Halcro, a Montana shop owner and president of the association, said getting the state auto dealers’ association involved in backing the legislation was part of what helped push it through the legislature, where it narrowly failed just two years earlier.

The Montana association this year had also backed a bill that would have allowed body shops and others – rather than only consumers—to file complaints with the state insurance commissioner’s office. That bill was overwhelmingly approved 97-3 by the Montana House, but died in a Senate committee.

What may have seemed to some at the most recent Collision Industry Conference (CIC) as a debate about esoteric computer jargon was actually a discussion about who gets access to all the information in a shop’s estimates.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, Fred Iantorno of the Collision Industry Electronic Commerce Association (CIECA) said the way a shop’s estimating data currently flows through any of the current electronic connections in the industry—to the shop’s management system, to insurers, to parts suppliers, to rental car companies or CSI providers—can be compared to repairing a car without applying the needed corrosion protection.

“You can’t see what’s inside of these systems to see if the corrosion protection has been put there or not,” Iantorno said. “But over time, it’s like a time bomb waiting to happen. The rust will show up, because essentially the corrosion protection hasn’t been changed since 1999.”

Iantorno, along with a number of collision repair trade associations and organizations, has been lobbying for a shift by the information providers away from using the older “EMS” standard for transferring estimate data to using the news “BMS” standard. Understanding what those acronyms stand for is less important, he said, than understanding the key difference between the two.

It’s a common complaint among collision repairers: It’s not worth contacting the state insurance commissioner’s office because they don’t do anything about our complaints.

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Yet in recent months, some state insurance commissioners have taken actions cheered by some shops, from radically changing their department’s focus, to issuing bulletins reminding insurers of state laws on steering or other shop-related activities.

What has led to these changes, and does it mean now is a good time for shops to reassess their interactions with state insurance regulators?

Some Success Stories
For decades, shops in many states have taken concerns about auto insurer practices to insurance divisions only quite often to be told, in essence, that such regulators are there to address consumer complaints about insurers, not business-to-business issues.

But even that mission isn’t being met well in some states. When John Doak took the helm of the Oklahoma Insurance Department earlier this year, he quickly announced  he was reorganizing the department’s anti-fraud division to focus on investigating insurance company fraud against consumers, rather than the other way around.

The skittishness among some in the industry about how formalized repair standards may be developed or implemented was evident during discussion at the most recent Collision Industry Conference (CIC).

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

At the meeting, the CIC-formed Repair Standards Advisory Committee offered an update on its work, including the hiring of a consultant to build a business case for the development and implementation of formalized standards.

Russ Thrall, publisher of CollisionWeek and a past CIC chairman and who co-chairs the advisory committee, said the goal of the consultant’s work is to present a report by November about what consensus exists within the industry about standards and a possible new organization to oversee the development and implementation of standards.

Thrall said that as of mid-July, the committee had raised $26,600 of the $60,000 it needs in sponsorships for the consultant’s work and the development of an industry forum on the topic in November. More than 50 percent of the 21 sponsors to date are collision repair businesses, 38 percent are suppliers and less than 5 percent are insurers.

Mike Condon, whose consulting firm has been hired by the committee, said he has conducted about 10 of the 40 interviews—about half with repairers and half with those in other segments of the industry—that he anticipates doing to prepare the report for the committee. That report, he said, will examine if there is support for the idea of a standard-setting body, and if so, how that body could be structured and funded. As part of the research, Condon also will examine standard-setting entities in other industries and in the collision repair industry in other countries.