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Date: Mar 18, 2005
Contributor: Chandra Kysar

Audit: Uninsured motorists burden system

Drivers with car insurance in Missouri spend about $90 million a year to cover costs racked up by uninsured motorists, according to a state audit released Wednesday.

That works out to an average of $23 per vehicle in higher annual premiums for insured drivers, said State Auditor Claire McCaskill. Speaking in St. Louis, she said the state Department of Revenue can do a better job making sure motorists have insurance, as required by law in Missouri.

McCaskill's audit also pointed out that state law currently excludes about a million registered vehicles -- rentals, commercial and fleet vehicles -- from insurance monitoring.

"We have no certainty right now if over a million vehicles on the road are insured or not," she said.

Under the state's current monitoring program, letters are sent to some drivers, which they return with a signed form attesting they are insured, along with a policy number and an expiration date.

Missouri's Director of Revenue, Trish Vincent, said 10 percent of the responses are checked quarterly to make sure the information is correct.

But McCaskill's audit recommended drivers be required to return a proof of insurance, such as a copy of an insurance card. The state Department of Revenue, in its formal response to the audit, agreed to make that change, though it set no date to implement it because the department needs to modify some related computer programming.

McCaskill also said information obtained from insurance companies is not always accurate and that can unnecessarily cause vehicles to be dropped from the existing monitoring system.

The audit also said the fee charged drivers caught without insurance to reinstate their license is $20, the lowest among 12 states contacted for comparison. McCaskill said lawmakers lowered those rates in 1999 in an apparent effort to increase the numbers of reinstatements, but her audit found reinstatements have dropped since the change.

McCaskill recommended that lawmakers raise the fee slightly, since it didn't appear lowering it had the intended effect, and consider using those funds to outsource some data collection in the effort to make sure more drivers are properly insured.

In a statement, Vincent called the findings "clearly an audit of the previous administration." Vincent said the Legislature never fully funded a program it authorized in 2000 to enforce the uninsured motorist law.

And even so, that program was never intended to identify every vehicle that isn't covered by insurance, she said, but rather was designed to serve as an additional deterrent against driving without insurance.

She said the department is concerned about uninsured motorists and suspends about 900 driver's licenses a month because drivers can't show a proof of insurance.




For more information relating to "Insured and Uninsured Drivers", please visit our Insured and Uninsured Drivers page.