Policy Checker
A broker workflow, automated by BrokerageAudit's Policy Checker, that compares issued policies against binders, applications, and prior terms to surface discrepancies.
What It Is
Policy checking is the broker workflow of comparing a newly issued policy against the documents that defined the agreement, typically the binder, the application, the proposal, the prior expiring policy, and any subjectivity letters. The goal is to catch carrier issuance errors before the document is delivered to the client and before a claim exposes the gap.
Brokers traditionally perform this work line by line, opening PDFs side by side and looking for differences in named insured spelling, mailing address, locations, classifications, limits, deductibles, forms and editions, scheduled equipment, drivers, additional insureds, waivers of subrogation, and endorsements. On a complex middle market account, a thorough policy check can take a CSR several hours and is often the step that gets compressed when the agency is busy.
BrokerageAudit's Policy Checker is the named product feature that automates this workflow. It ingests the binder, application, and issued policy, extracts structured data from each, and produces a discrepancy report ranked by E&O severity, so the producer or CSR reviews a focused list rather than the entire document set.
Why It Matters for Brokers
Policy checking is the single highest-leverage error control in a brokerage. The Big I and most major E&O carriers cite missed policy discrepancies, wrong limits, missing endorsements, mis-scheduled property, omitted additional insureds, as the most frequent root cause of paid agency E&O claims, with average severity around seventy-five thousand dollars. An agency that consistently checks policies catches carrier mistakes that would otherwise be discovered at the worst possible moment, in the middle of a claim, when the contract has already been delivered and the statute on a malpractice claim is running.
Real-World Example
A manufacturer renews a property and CGL package with a new carrier. The binder shows a four million dollar building limit at the main location and a CG 20 10 04 13 additional insured endorsement naming the landlord. When the issued policy arrives, the building limit reads four hundred thousand dollars, a transcription error, and the additional insured endorsement attached is the older CG 20 10 10 01 edition. The CSR runs the document through Policy Checker, which surfaces both issues within minutes. The carrier issues a corrected policy before the certificate is sent to the landlord.
Common Mistakes
- 1Skipping the policy check because the binder looked clean, which assumes the carrier processed the binder data without transcription or system mapping errors.
- 2Checking only declarations and ignoring the forms schedule, where edition dates and missing endorsements drive most of the meaningful coverage gaps.
- 3Treating the policy check as a one-time event rather than re-running it after every endorsement, which is when many silent changes are introduced.
- 4Documenting the check informally in email or notes, leaving no audit trail when an E&O carrier asks for evidence of the agency's quality control process.
How brokerageaudit.com Handles This
Policy Checker is BrokerageAudit's flagship comparison engine. It pairs the binder, application, and issued policy through the Document Pipeline, extracts named insureds, limits, deductibles, forms, and endorsements, then routes anything below a confidence threshold to the Review Queue. Every check produces a timestamped report that lives with the policy as a permanent E&O artifact.