The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has explained the reasons many insurance firms fall short of quality financial statements.
The IMF highlighted this in a report entitled: ‘Publication of Financial Industry Assessment Program Documentation – Detailed Assessment of Observance of Insurance Core Principles’, stated that the challenge does not only hinder effective supervision but also timely disclosure of information to policyholders and the market.
The organisation urged NAICOM to collaborate with the Financial Regulator Council (FRC) to improve the reliability of audited financial statements to enable regulators to focus on both quantitative analysis and qualitative aspects of supervision.
To promote proper governance, it urged regulators to take insurers and directors to task for submitting inaccurate information.
Determined to address the identified issue and other associated challenges, NAICOM, in its response, said it is building a robust tool, a platform for interconnecting all industry stakeholders to support real-time aggregation of data.
The insurance policy platform, it said, is a digital platform to capture all insurance policies issued in Nigeria with a unique identifier. The portal will generate a unique identifier for every policy issued by insurance companies to enable insurance customers and third-party entities such as law enforcement agencies to query and validate their insurance policies.
According to the Deputy Director, Information Technology, NAICOM, Abiodun Aribike, the Commission uses an electronic document management system to store and manage files and keep images of paper documents in a secure location. He added that NAICOM has a workflow system built into it.
“This software helps the Commission to control and manage access to important official documents, maintain restricted access to confidential documents, reduce the time and efforts taken to locate documents, reduce the loss of documents and provide safe storage and backup,” he said.
