When a claim is denied because a coverage the insured expected wasn't on the policy, the next call is often to the agency's errors-and-omissions carrier. 'Failure to procure' and 'failure to maintain' coverage are among the most common — and most defensible-or-not — agents' E&O allegations, and the difference usually comes down to procedure.
A renewal policy-checking procedure — comparing every issued renewal to the expiring policy and documenting the result — is one of the cleanest controls an agency can point to.
The fact pattern the check defends against
A renewal comes back with a dropped completed-operations additional insured, a narrowed causes-of-loss form, or a new exclusion. Nobody compares it to the prior policy. A loss hits the gap. The insured argues they reasonably expected the same coverage they'd carried for years — and asks why their agent didn't catch the change. Without a checking record, that's a hard claim to defend.
What makes the procedure defensible
Three things turn 'we usually check' into a defensible control:
- Consistency — every renewal checked the same way, not just the accounts someone remembered.
- Documentation — a dated record of what was compared, what changed, and what was communicated to the insured.
- Communication — flagged changes actually surfaced to the client, so the file shows informed acceptance.
Producing the artifact the audit expects
BindCheck doesn't grant the credit — it produces the record the audit (and any E&O defense) wants to see. Every renewal, new-business and coverage-standard check is saved with the date, the changed or missing forms/limits/endorsements, the manuscript items flagged for review, and a source-page citation on each finding — the consistent, documented coverage review a procedures audit is checking for.