Court: Insurance company not to blame for wrong beneficiary designation
July 24, 2013 by Steven A. Meyerowitz
A federal district court in Illinois has ruled that a life insurance company owed no duty to an insured’s employer (in this case, the U.S. government) to properly maintain designation of beneficiary forms. If that duty existed, the district court found, it ran to the insured and beneficiaries.
The case: A lawsuit against the U.S. government alleged that it had failed to properly maintain and/or forward a new designation of beneficiary form signed by Robert Conner, a Small Business Administration (SBA) employee, which meant that the beneficiaries under that form did not receive the life insurance benefits they would have been entitled to receive after Conner’s death. Click here to read…