How Florida property insurers keep secrets from policy holders — with the state’s help

Florida property insurers are keeping secrets.

Empowered by industry-friendly state statutes and court rulings, they’re blocking access to information about how their firms set premiums, handle claims, and shift profits out of the reach of regulators. They insist it wouldn’t be fair for their competitors to learn these critical “trade secrets.”

But Florida’s trade secrets shield also blocks homeowners from comparing insurance companies, and keeps information from policy holders that could bolster claim payouts for repairs.

And state regulators won’t step in to decide whether all this information really needs to be kept confidential. Instead, they force aggrieved information-seekers to fight it out with insurers and their well-compensated lawyers in court.

Jeremy Berman could tell you how well that goes. The Fort Myers Beach homeowner fought for two years to see records his insurer, Olympus Insurance Co., compiled before denying coverage of damage Berman says was caused by Hurricane Ian’s winds in September 2022. He lost, like every one of the dozens of individuals who have challenged Florida insurers’ trade secret designations, according to a South Florida Sun Sentinel review of 15 years of court records.

Chip Merlin, president of Tampa-based Merlin Law Group, a well-known plaintiffs firm, contends that insurers increasingly label their records as trade secrets to hide strategies they employ to reduce claims payments to their policyholders.

“If claims handling records are protected as trade secrets,” Merlin asked, “how do you really track these people and what they’re really doing?”

Alarmed by what they see as an uneven playing field, several legislators are proposing bills to reduce the number of secrets insurers are legally able to keep. The lawmakers contend the state’s loose regulation of insurer secrecy is unfair to homeowners who are required to purchase insurance to obtain mortgage loans.

Home insurance, they say, should be treated the same as other essentials like food, water and electricity, with required disclosures that can help customers make informed decisions.

But those bills face a rough road to becoming law this year. On Feb. 5, with the 2026 regular session nearly half complete, Senate president Ben Albritton said he doesn’t want to see major changes that could obstruct long-awaited premium reductions he’s convinced are just around the corner.

Where will that leave policyholders? On the outside of an increasingly secretive world.

Chipping away

Across the United States, lawmakers have long agreed to keep wide swaths of information about insurers’ everyday operations from public scrutiny. Rules developed in conjunction with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners allow insurers to hide identities and addresses of their policyholders, as well as details of claims they file and how those claims are resolved.

But some states, including Florida with its history of insurer insolvencies, once promoted other forms of transparency by giving the public access to searchable databases that insurers are required to use when they upload information to regulators.

Beginning in 2009, the public could query the Office of Insurance Regulation’s Quarterly and Supplemental Reporting System (QUASR) system for comparative information, including the number of policies written by each company in each of Florida’s 67 counties. The reports also contained data on numbers of policies canceled or non-renewed in each county.

Intrepid users armed with this data could quickly calculate companies’ average premium costs by county as well.

But access to that and other information has been chipped away, beginning in 2014.

The impetus came from State Farm Florida, which had just resumed writing policies in the state following a long hiatus and decided that release of its county-level data would enable competitors to find out which regions it was targeting to grow its business.

So it told the state it considered its county-level data to be a trade secret. State insurance regulators rejected the effort and announced plans to release it to the public anyway.

State Farm Florida sued the OIR, and by 2017 it had won at the circuit and appellate court level. Judges agreed that the county-level data contained “independent economic value, or potential value at least” and said requiring release of the data would leave the company at a competitive disadvantage, declaring the state’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act was on State Farm’s side.

In the years after the ruling, according to records gathered by the Sun Sentinel, 85 other companies followed State Farm’s lead and declared their county-by-county data a trade secret as well.

What’s under wraps

Companies are also increasingly using the designation to shield other filings, including documents submitted to support changes to rates and coverages.

On the state insurance office’s Rate and Form Filing Search page, the public once could access documents showing differences in proposed premiums for homeowners, condo unit owners and renters in dozens of coverage territories across the state, a level of geographic detail that made the comparisons more precise. Much of that material is now unavailable, along with catastrophe models used to develop rates, and emails outlining regulators’ objections to how rates were developed.

The practices of individual companies vary, and some continue to use the trade-secret designation sparingly. But the quantity of once-public data now being shielded is vast.

Of 82 documents that Florida Peninsula, one of the state’s top dozen property insurers, filed to support a rate change taking place on March 1, 2026, 72 were stamped as trade secrets. Of the remaining 10, only two were not generic forms, and another two described procedures the company could follow to exercise its option to declare its documents as trade secrets.

By contrast, in 2019, none of the 84 documents filed with Florida Peninsula’s request for a rate change that year were designated as trade secrets.

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Similarly, just 42 of 167 documents supporting a 2015 American Integrity rate filing for its owner-occupied single family home policies were labeled trade secrets. In a 2024 rate filing for the same category of coverage, 61 of 67 supporting documents were shielded.

Many companies even shield their policy manuals — which outline coverages and restrictions — as trade secrets, even though they are mailed to new customers after they sign coverage contracts.

Homeowners used to be able to download pages from those manuals as they were choosing their insurance company, to compare how coverages differ among competitors. By downloading other available documents, they could track how regulators responded to insurers’ requests for changes.

Shiloh Elliott, a spokeswoman for the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, said the office has seen only a “slight uptick” in trade secret filings over the past decade. But responding later to a Sun Sentinel request for a 10-year tally of trade secret affidavits, which companies are required to file when they submit trade secret designations, Elliott said, “that is not something we track.”

Homeowners pursuing information on their claim settlements run into even more maddening obstacles.

Insurers may deny their requests to turn over detailed claim files, including adjusters’ field notes, mental impressions or diaries generated when investigating damage claims.

Rep. Toby Overdorf, a Republican representing parts of Martin and St. Lucie counties, told the Sun Sentinel that he’s working with homeowners in his district who, after receiving a claim settlement offer, have been unable to convince their insurer to turn over the estimates from the company’s adjuster.

Overdorf said he asked the Office of Insurance Regulation to intervene. He says he’s “almost” assured the homeowners, who he says have not yet filed a lawsuit, will get the requested documents.

The rules get even tougher once a policyholder files a lawsuit, or an insurer reasonably believes a lawsuit could be filed. At that point, claim files are considered protected “work products.” Policyholders are barred from seeing internal notes, strategy memos, and communications between the insurer and its legal team unless they can prove they need the information to build their case and cannot get it anywhere else.

Merlin contends that insurers hide how they investigate claims because they don’t want the public to learn their “proprietary” methods to evade paying them.

“It’s obvious to me that with respect to an insurance company’s internal claims practices, that they don’t necessarily want to ever have those see the light of day because they might be embarrassing, they might establish potential civil liability or even give rise to regulatory responsibilities,” he said.

But several insiders maintain that the trade secrets criticism is overblown, noting that insurance regulators in Florida have access to most of the material denied to members of the public.

Dulce Suarez-Resnick, vice president of sales at the Miami-based agency Accentria Insurance, says those materials include contracts between insurers and their holding companies, worksheets developed for rate filings, and policy manuals proposed for revision.

Sharing them with the Office of Insurance Regulation, she said, is required for carriers to get their Certificates of Authority to write business in Florida. The materials, she insisted, “are not kept secret from (the Office of Insurance Regulation) but more from the competition.”

How other states handle requests

While the language of Florida’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act is similar to that found in many states, its approach to protecting insurers’ rights to shield claim documents differs sharply.

California, for instance, requires insurers to provide “a complete response based on the facts then known” to policyholders who file a claim, and courts there have generally interpreted this to entitle policyholders to see documents, like adjuster notes and estimates, before deciding whether to sue.

A recent Louisiana law forces insurers to turn over extensive material, including written reports, estimates, bids, plans, measurements, drawings, and reports by engineers and contractors.

New York requires insurers to turn over claims adjustment materials produced prior to the day they deny a claim or one of the parties files a lawsuit.

But Florida law requires insurers only to provide a “detailed estimate of the amount of the loss” within seven days of a request, along with a “reasonable explanation” for claim denials, records of communications between the insurer and policy holder, and records of physical inspections of the property made by the insurer.

Florida’s process to contest trade secret designations also places a heavy burden on the policy holder.

To challenge an insurer’s assertion in New York or many other states that material is a trade secret, requesters must make a public records filing for the material through their department of insurance.

The department then has seven days to issue a determination, and either party — the insurer or requestor — will have another seven days to appeal the department’s decision through the courts.

In contrast, Florida makes it challenging for a requestor even to argue their case. Insurance regulators notify the targeted company that a request has been filed and gives it 30 days to file a lawsuit — naming the Office of Insurance Regulation as defendant and seeking to block release of the requested records. Failure to file a lawsuit results in automatic release of the information.

That’s the procedure even though the office itself maintains that it’s merely a “neutral facilitator” and will make no argument in court supporting release of materials insurers claim as trade secrets.

“The OIR does not decide which documents qualify for this protection; that responsibility lies with the company providing the information,” says OIR spokeswoman Elliott.

Requestors are kept out of the proceedings unless they — like Berman, the Fort Myers Beach homeowner — insist on an opportunity to argue their case.

Then they must hire a lawyer or represent themselves and petition the court to be included. Only a handful of requestors have taken that step in recent years.

Berman represented himself in his effort to obtain files Olympus created while investigating his damage claim.

After he submitted his public record request in October 2023, Olympus responded with a lawsuit to block Berman from getting the materials. The company argued that the records were “confidential and exempt from disclosure” and would cause “irreparable harm” if they landed in the hands of competitors.

The company even filed a motion seeking to block Berman’s request to be named as an intervenor in the case.

Although the court allowed Berman to insert himself, it ultimately ruled on Feb. 9, 2026, more than two years after he filed his records request, that he was not entitled to get access to materials generated during the investigation of his claim.

Contacted by the Sun Sentinel, Berman declined a request for an interview about his efforts, saying he has no plans to pursue the matter in court and just wants to put it behind him.

Others requestors have had no better luck. In a review of 93 cases filed since 2010 in Leon County involving Floridians who sought access to materials designated as “trade secret” by insurers, the Sun Sentinel found no rulings denying insurers’ requests to keep their materials protected.

In addition to keeping claims files under wraps, the decisions in these cases denied requests to see stock purchase agreements, enrollees in a health insurance plan, files submitted to regulators pursuing a market conduct examination, proposals to take out certain policies from the state’s insurer of last resort, and documents spelling out an insurer’s business arrangement with its holding company.

Changing the law?

Of the five bills this legislative session that would limit insurers’ abilities to apply trade secret designations, the most consequential were filed in the Senate by Carlos Guillermo Smith, an Orange County Democrat, and Don Gaetz, a Republican from the Panhandle region.

They were sparked in part by outrage last spring over a study that the Office of Insurance Regulation withheld from legislators for three years. The study found insurers avoided a 4.5% state profit cap by funneling billions to affiliates, often depicting that money as fees their own affiliates charged them, while claiming that their insurance divisions lost millions between 2017 and 2019.

Smith’s bill would bar trade secret designations for any financial information used in the calculation or justification of insurance rates, restoring the previously public nature of the rate-setting process. Opened up as well would be records of transactions between insurers and any of their affiliates, including fees, commissions, payments, or profit sharing agreements with managing general agents, claims handlers, reinsurers, or third party administrators.

Also public under Smith’s bill: officer and employee compensation, dividends paid to shareholders, any information used to support or oppose proposed legislation, and all documents submitted to the state in rate filings.

“It will increase transparency and accurate rate making,” Smith told the Sun Sentinel, “by clearly detailing what information insurers are allowed to claim as trade secrets when reporting financial information to the Office of Insurance Regulation.”

Gaetz’s bill, an effort to make the relationship between an insurer and its affiliated companies more transparent, would require the office to create reports on insurers and related entities that share executive officers and at least 10% common ownership. The reports would have to include executive salaries, benefits, stock options, bonuses, stock buybacks and other taxable payments and be published annually on the office’s website.

Lifting trade secret protections of payments to affiliates isn’t necessary, argues Paul Handerhan, president of the Fort Lauderdale-based watchdog group Federal Association for Insurance Reform, because the Office of Insurance Regulation thoroughly reviews all agreements between insurers and their affiliates.

“There’s 100% transparency,” Handerhan said. “Now maybe you as a homeowner don’t know, but the office certainly knows and approves every penny that’s going from the insurance company to the affiliate, through those agreements.”

But John Rollins, former chief risk officer for state-owned Citizens Property Insurance Corp. and current CEO of Patriot Select Insurance, said in an interview that he would have no problem with laws requiring companies to be more transparent to the public.

Affiliates that provide services to insurers “should charge fair and reasonable fees, and those fees should be transparent and subject to scrutiny,” he says.

His own company pays fees to affiliates, he says, and he would appreciate knowing how others handle their relationships with their managing general agents. “I would love to have a comparison of the percentage that every insurance company in state is paying their MGA,” he said.

How are Florida’s property insurance reforms impacting you? The South Florida Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel are continuing to track the state’s insurance market, and we are looking for tips from homeowners, agents, and industry insiders. Email us at [email protected].

Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071 or by email at [email protected].

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