An Honest Accident
My co-worker accidentally backed his company truck into my personal car while it was parked. He alerted me and our local manager immediately—we took photos, filled out the incident report, yadda yadda yadda. We did all the proper stuff we were supposed to do.
Everyone in our office was in agreement about what happened; that it was an honest accident and the company’s insurance should cover the cost of fixing my car.
Then the HR director got involved. First, he tried to get me to assume liability since it was my personal vehicle that “caused” the accident. Um, my car was parked in the parking lot and I was inside at my desk when it happened. When I pointed this out, he backed down and said he would file the claim.
But he had another nasty surprise in store for me. Next, I got a call from a hostile insurance adjuster from my company’s insurance demanding that I provide my insurance information or they would be pursuing court action.
It turns out the HR director had filed the claim saying that I had run into the parked work truck with my car and tried to flee the scene until a co-worker saw what was going on and reported me. REALLY.
I informed the adjuster of what had actually happened and emailed her the photos, signed incident reports, and witness statements that we had filled out. She changed her tune pretty quickly and said she would get back to me.
The next day, I was slapped with a “settlement agreement” from HR asking me to accept $1,100 for repairs and to sign a form releasing the company from any further responsibility.
I had only just dropped my car off at the body shop and hadn’t even gotten the estimate back yet. When I obviously declined, I was told that I either had to accept their offer or be out of luck. At this point, I reached out to my own insurance and told them what had happened.
As I went through the sequence of events, I could hear my agent getting almost giddy about all the blatantly improper tactics HR had tried on me. In the end, they processed my claim and pursued my own company’s insurance through subrogation.
He also mentioned that they would probably be seeking additional damages due to the falsification of statements in the initial claim. In the end, the damage ended up costing over $4,000 to fix but I didn’t have to pay a cent, not even my deductible.
I don’t know if the HR director experienced any consequences, but there was a comment in our finance VP’s year-end report about needing to “reduce extraneous costs due to reporting delays and inaccuracies in liability claims.”