Plenty Of Pressure Applied By Insurers To Cut Adjusters' Estimate, Or "Claim Reassigned To Someone Who Complies"
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The hearing, before a subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, included testimony from two adjusters who work for Pilot Catastrophe Services, a third-party company employed by Allstate. They accused Allstate reviewers of doctoring their work, altering and deleting their findings to lower the final estimate — ultimately reducing the amount of money the company had to pay out in claims. “Frequently, these alterations and deletions are simply false,” Pilot property adjuster Clifford Millikan said. “There is no room for discussion. If an adjuster resists, the claim is reassigned to someone who complies.”
Nick Schroeder, another property adjuster who handled Allstate claims while working for Pilot, said this had happened to him repeatedly. He said that he had previously been pressured to deny hail damage as ordinary wear and tear, “despite visible hail impact marks.” While working on Allstate claims after Helene, he found that his estimates were “frequently rejected or returned with requests or modifications that often reduced coverage.” The hearing also elevated storm victims’ complaints about how they have been treated by home insurance companies, including Allstate and State Farm, in the aftermath of Helene. The storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane in September, causing significant damage as it cut through the Southeast. Helene claimed more than 100 lives and destroyed or damaged more than 185,000 homes in North Carolina, where it left an estimated $60 billion worth of damage in its wake.
The eastern half of Georgia was also hard-hit. Natalia Migal, a homeowner in Sandy Springs, a suburb of Atlanta, testified Tuesday that after Helene sent a 70-foot oak tree crashing on top of her house, Allstate gave her a “lowball” estimate of $46,000 to repair the damage. Migal hired a public adjuster who reassessed the damage to her home and found it was much greater, upward of $500,000. Allstate responded, she said, by bringing in another adjuster who produced a much lower quote for the damage, this time around $100,000.
Migal said that when she contacted this last adjuster to ask for an explanation, he said that Allstate had rejected his initial submission and instructed him “to remove numerous line items — not once but twice — until the amount was reduced to a fraction of the actual loss.” During his testimony, Schroeder said he was one of the adjusters Allstate sent to assess Migal’s home. As he prepared to finish an estimate that he determined was a proper payment for damage to her home, “I was taken off the case, and the claim was assigned to a different adjuster,” he said.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/05/13/hurricane-helene-milton-insurance-claims/
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