Another Lesson on Why Just Reprinting Press Releases from the ICs Office is NOT A Good Idea
From the NJ Editorial on Sunday:
With new regulations and contract consultants
What new regulations? Seriously — there was a major revision to the statutes in 2005, additional revisions in 2007, and the last seems to be in 2008. Now these links are from the Delaware Captive Insurance Association, which is an industry group, so I imagine they are keeping up on the regs here.
Interestingly, this same Association provides more data on the number and growth of Delaware Captives since the 2005 statute revision:
The State of Delaware licensed 22 Captives in 2008, bringing its total number of active
licenses to 40. This represents 122% growth during the calendar year and marks a
significant increase over the 5 captives that were licensed prior to the revision of the
Delaware statute in 2005.
So there were 5 captives here before 2005 and 40 by the close of 2008. Meaning that Delaware added 35 captives since 2005 and 22 of those licensed in 2008. So there already was an effort to add these companies to the revenue rolls, there was no new legislation and the NJ is buying lock, stock and barrel the ICs narrative that there is something new about this. When the only thing that is really new about this is the hiring of campaign crony(s) — and paying them more money — to take over an effort that has been ongoing and functional since 2005 or 2006.
There was an opportunity for real reporting or even for weighing in on how state agencies decide to spend revenues for the possibility of increasing those revenues or even how to get these agencies to be more accountable for these spending initiatives.
Tags: Insurance Commissioner
Although an “X-File” thesis, it appears that the BS bid put out by KWS and Elliot a couple of months ago quietly went away, to be replaced by ‘stacking’ the payroll of the captive insurance program that was run by Denn with one guy. They appeared to be trying to get money to cronies with the transparent bid, and when that bid was shot-down by Delaware Liberal, they moved the state money transfer vehicle to the captive program.
One thing to watch out for – it s a given that if you want to hire someone with insurance expertise, that person will have a long career working for one or more insurance companies, possibly including lobbying duties. It would be very difficult to hire someone who doesn’t have that kind of background.
So the thing to look for is, what are these people actually doing in these roles? I don’t pretend to know, but that would probably be a good subject for FOIA, after a little research first to learn what to ask for.
anon, we hired our current Insurance Commissioner, and she didn’t have any experience.
I just posted this in response to the last comment by anoni on yesterday’s feature about KWS’s supposed new venture, but it’s better off here.
1. KWS’s campaign finance report is an intentional effort alright, although not to hide where the money went, but where it came from. Accepting contributions from insurers violates Delaware law, and that she did accept them will be a problem as soon as all the sources are identified.
2. While many politicians lie about their qualifications, KWS’s aren’t just embellished but totally invented. She even lied about her age. September 11 is her 62nd birthday, not her 60th.
3. Just about everyone in the party leadership is well aware of her incompetence and corruption. However, she thinks one term is all she needs to retire very comfortably after entering office nearly bankrupt, so 2012 is not an issue for her, especially since she knows she will be defeated.
4. In light of #3, evidence of criminality is being gathered. KWS won’t be the first IC to go to jail, or the last. It’s common knowledge in the insurance industry that nearly all ICs are stupid and corrupt. She’s no different but is just more overt and shameless about it.
Question for Lower 40 and Gabriel and the others who possible have some knowledge here — what would it take to ID the names on the campaign finance report? I’m thinking of a crowd-sourced effort — get the last reports up in some clearer way and ask folks to tell us who these people are. You would not have to lose your anonymity to do this, but your info would have to be verifiable. As in if you say that Jake Z works for ABC Insurance Corp, we’d have to be able to check that.
BS bid put out by KWS and Elliot a couple of months ago quietly went away, to be replaced by ’stacking’ the payroll of the captive insurance program that was run by Denn with one guy
I wish there was something we could take credit for here, but I think that the BS RFP went through the process and awards were made. I think that this consultant crowd is the result of those awards which is probably why they worked so hard at making sure none of our questions got answered. That is really hard to say for sure since the RFP was so incredibly defective, and the awards not publicly announced and the contracts not publicly available.
Personally I’m surprised that this kind of operation is acceptable to the administration.
Cassy,
Follow the link on the other DKWS post to her campaingf inance report. Contrary to what Lower 40 said, the contributors are listed:
including $35,000 from the Democrat party
and some interesting zero interest loans
take the names and go to open secrets dot com.
plug them in and see if any gave to federal candidates, you are required to list you occupation on federal finance reports. This will let you know if any are insurance industry insiders.
As for whether insurance industry contributions are illegal, you will have to do some reasearch…
Lower 40 might have meant the $78,000+ her campaign finance report lists as total individual contributions of $100 or less. Those are the insurance industry contributions where the sources were concealed. Also, remember the obscene swearing-in party she threw herself at the Hotel Dupont when even Denn and Markell had just a public wienie roast? She had enough money in the campaign fund to pay for it but the filing doesn’t show any payments high enough to cover that $25-30,000 bill. So who paid for it? That question was never answered. I’m sure the FEC and IRS would be really interested.
Re. the named individual contributors: all but a few can be found on Google. Most of them are insurance company lawyers she met at NAIC meetings and those of other industry associations she infiltrated by claiming she owned an insurance consultancy. If they’re private practitioners, it’s not illegal for them to contribute except if they’re acting as conduits for insurers, which they were for the most part. I have no idea how to identify the contributors in the catch-all $78,000 total. It would probably take a subpoena of her own and the campaign’s bank records, which I’m sure the FBI, IRS, or FEC will produce at some point.
To clear up some confusion here: KWS does not appear to be hiding where her campaign funding came from; she appears to be trying to hide where it was spent.
In her last campaign finance report, she did list all contributers who donated over $100.
She also claimed to have spent $78,000; all in increments of less than $100.
Who is Daniel Harkins of Claymont?
Why did he lend the campaign of Demolcrat Karen Weldin Stewart $10,000 at 0% interest in December… after the election?
Ok…if she’s hiding where that $78,000 was spent, maybe it went to pay off her credit card defaults and other judgments against her that were posted online by Mourning Constitution just before the election? That plus the $10,000 from Daniel Harkins? How else could she have been bonded as commissioner?
How do you pay off credit card defaults in increments less than $100?
It is plenty odd though — to have $78K of expenditures in less than $100 increments. Or odd in most of the campaigns I’ve been involved with at any rate.
It was probably spent in whatever amounts and then reported as less than $100 increments. Who would have known the difference, since you don’t have to identify the payees?
If an expenditure IS over $100, then she is required to identify the recipient.
I could be wrong, but I believe the elections commissioner has the power to look at all the spending, even the stuff that doesn’t have to be listed because it’s under the reporting thresholds.
I would hope somebody would ask to see the checkbook. Is there a way to request it? Do they have to respond?
The Election Commissioner is a Democrat
There will be no investigation.
For once, I agree with anoni. This will be buried, but not necessarily because of the party connection. IIRC, some Republicans voiced objections to Mike Protack’s report, which claimed all the money he raised except one check was for less than $100. Never heard a thing more about it, because the “job” apparently is just a spoils-system appointment. No actual work is required or expected.
With Protack, I believe it.
I can’t believe that anyone would write him a check for more than 100 cents, let alone more than 100 dollars.
No actual work is required or expected
Which is really pitiful even when people file a complaint. This office should not just check off the list of reports they receive and publish pdfs of them, they should be taking a hard look at some of them at least on a random basis to see if there are irregularities. I don’t get how a report with 78K of expenditures less than $100 passes the smell test.
I think that a closer look would show that under Bill White, the number went from 6 to 18 Captive insurance companies not 40. I don’t know why there is a discrepancy in these links (which I provided for you, Cass –nice way to credit your source).
I think that a closer look shows you that the 40 is what the local industry’s association is reporting. And since that Press Release has been there for awhile, I wouldn’t bet on it being wrong now.
And I didn’t credit your links since your links (one to captive.com with an interview of Mr. White and the other to the DCIA with a description of their first conference) weren’t exactly germaine to the discussion. The links I used above — to the history of the revisions of the current law and to discuss the number of captives — were not provided by you, so you get no credit. And Just in case people want to check, here are those links: here and here.
Which should tell you something about who is actually clicking on those links. But who wants credit for providing data she never did. Yet here you are — trying to take credit for information that doesn’t even help whatever argument you are working on here.
Bill White did not voluntarily choose not to renew his contract. From the time KWS took office she set about making life difficult for him to force him out and make room for Steve Kinion. By April he had had enough and advised her that he would leave the department.
Heard the same thing that Lower Forty reported. Which, if true, would explaine why White never bothered to re-apply for the position. Which also makes sense, as who would pay for a ticket riding a guaranteed train-wreck.
Kinion didn’t just show up when Bill White’s tenure ended the end of July. He’s been going back and forth between DE and Illinois once a week since January, all expenses paid. He was on the dubious transition team, too, and in two capacities even.
On Steve Kinion:
Mr. Kinion is the Senior Advisor to the Commissioner and when Bill White left, the Commissioner added to Mr. Kinion’s portfolio by appointing him Director of the Bureau of Captive and Financial Insurance Products. Mr. Kinion, an attorney has spent virtually his entire professional career in the legal, regulatory and business sides of the insurance industry. He was a Deputy Commissioner of the Oklahoma Insurance Department and is an expert, among many other disciplines, on health care and health insurance. He has never and now does not get reimbursed for his expenses He does not receive the benefit package that are part of employee compensation. He also is not a lobbyist. Mr. Kinion is a Major in the Army Reserve. We believe that we are lucky to have Mr. Kinion.
Bill White:
Mr. White did a good job for the state and people of Delaware, substantially increasing the number of captive entities. Mr. White did not work alone. He had the benefit of a financial analyst, an assistant, an attorney etc. His staffing increased after Commissioner Stewart took office. The Commissioner offered Mr. White a one year renewal of his contract and he declined. He was then offered the opportunity to be retained on a project by project basis and he declined that.
RFP for the Management Review
No awards have been made. We have received, I believe, six proposals.
Captives and other Initiatives
Our approach to Captives is not how many but how much premium tax they generate. For example Vermont, over the 25 years of its life, has about 700 captives generating about $25 million (an average of $35,714 per captive). We have about 43 captives generating around $575,000 (an average of $13,372 per captive). Different types and complexities of Captives generate different levels of premium tax.
Beyond the Captive program, we have retained a firm to do premium tax audits in order to recoup possible undereported or uncollected premium tax. This firm recovered $7 million for the state of Nevada.
We are also looking into the possibility of developing a reinsurance exchange in Delaware, considering legislation that would make the state a home to demutualized firms and going after insurance carriers to domicile here. We are examining these avenues to see if there is something worth pursuing. However, we are just in the examination stage.
Dan Harkins
Dan Harkins passed away last Monday. The $10,000 the campaign owes the estate covers the house we rented from Mr. Harkins where I have lived since coming here. The $10,000 represents rent of $1000 per month from March to December 2008. Dan was an active community advocate, an academic and a former athlete. He was a close frined of the Commissioners and his passing haunts all of us who knew him.
Staffing, Payroll and other Matters
The Department of Insurance has a full time staff of 69, 2 office temps, I believe 2 casual/seasonals and the contractors. We have about sixteen vacancies which we declined to fill to save money. These include the Deputy Commissioner’s position, the Director of Consumer Services (we have an acting director who fills this position as well as his original position at the original position salary) and the Director of the Bureau of Examinations, Rehabilitation and Guaranty. The Department generated approximately $116 million in revenue, of which all but about $25 million goes to the General Fund with the $25 million or so going to first reponder pensions and operations. It costs about $22 million to run the Department.
Elliott
Thank you, Elliott, KWS’s chief cook/bottlewasher/cleaner-upper. Not once since your boss took office have we heard directly from her. Why is that? Oh wait…she’s incompetent. You make sure she never puts her foot in it as she did during the campaign by never letting her out in public unsupervised.
Your attempts to spin this into something wholesome are unconvincing,and KWS’s apparent delusions of grandeur and visions of expanding her domain to the international sphere don’t fool anyone. It’s not going to happen. We all know she is inherently incapable of having come up with all of that, so whatever you keep telling us about the department and her supposed work, especially on the department’s website, reflects the opinions and strivings of her overpaid and unelected consultants, you included, none of whom she would need if she really were the expert she claimed in her campaign to be. The sorry lot of you have obviously forgotten that the insurance department’s first duty is to the citizens of Delaware who tragically elected this joke of an IC.
We all know KWS harrassed Bill White into quitting by denying him funds, expenses, and staff to make room for Steve Kinion, so you can stop the BS about that, too.
Hold on a second: Her campaign is paying Elliott’s rent?
“The $10,000 the campaign owes the estate covers the house we rented from Mr. Harkins where I have lived since coming here.”
The rent claim is probably a lie, just like about everything else generated by Elliott’s pen and KWS’s mouth. In fact, I don’t think either of them has ever come up with anything completely truthful and undistorted.
This recalls a question someone was asking about the swearing in ceremony held by KWS at the DuPont Hotel. So who did pay for that and why wouldn’t they be able to pay back this “loan” for living expenses? That is an odd expense for a local campaign in a very small place.
Dan Harkins’ celebration of life is set for 2PM today at the historic Robinson House in Claymont. If you are all still sqwaking aimlessly about this man, I would strongly advise you attend the ceremony today and discover what kind of contributions he has made to the fabric of community here in New Castle County.
Dan’s many selfless acts are there for all to read with the simple keying of the google. Shame on DLers for mindlessly shitting on anything that has pricked their schoolyard mentalities at any given moment.
Your artless and ignorant knock-down of some of Delaware’s most gentle and generous souls is beyond the pale.
Read about Dan. And remember him today.
“Your artless and ignorant knock-down of some of Delaware’s most gentle and generous souls is beyond the pale.”
As is your defense of some of Delaware’s sleaziest souls.
And certainly ignores that no one knocked down Dan Harkins’. Just asked alot of questions about money spent and loaned to the campaign. Pretending that substantive and legit questions are somehow an insult to people everywhere is just plain stupid, Nancy. Especially, as rhubard points out, that you are delighted to come to the defense of some of the most compromised pols in Delaware.