An insurance auditor is a professional tasked with determining the validity of claims submitted for payment to insurance companies. This person is responsible for visually inspecting and verifying any statements made by each party during the claims process, as well as communicating with experts to determine the validity of the testimony given. Another aspect of being an insurance auditor is determining a fair value for anything lost or damaged by an insurance company’s clients in order to provide compensation. Insurance auditors specialize in almost every valuable commodity sold on the planet, and there are many different types of insurance auditors.
An insurance auditor who works in the automotive industry is probably the most well-known. When a vehicle is involved in a collision, the auditor inspects the vehicles involved to determine the cause of the collision, the extent of the physical damage, and any other factors that may be relevant. This procedure typically entails the insurance auditor speaking with the police and any other witnesses to verify the validity of the claim, after which a settlement is generated based on the extent of the damages. This type of auditor is usually kept very busy because there are hundreds of different factors to consider and thousands of parts on each automobile.
A small percentage of insurance claims are typically fraudulent in almost any industry. An insurance auditor’s daily responsibilities also include investigating fraud and collaborating with law enforcement when criminal intent is suspected. Because these types of crimes are often well-planned and difficult to prove, an insurance auditor dealing with rare art, for example, could save his company millions of dollars each year by noticing subtle problems while processing claims. Consumers who deny that transactions on their account were authorized are also a common source of fraud in the banking industry, and these cases frequently result in criminal prosecution. In some of these cases, the insurance adjuster becomes the prosecution’s star witness when the case goes to trial.
However, an insurance adjuster’s job is rarely about apprehending notorious criminals, and on any given day, a single adjuster may be tasked with handling a half-dozen or more standard cases. The majority of the workday is spent evaluating monetary losses over the phone or the Internet, with several hours spent driving to gather evidence and process each claim. This type of job is typically paid on a “per job” basis, which means that the size of an insurance adjuster’s average paycheck is determined by his overall efficiency.