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I Used to Look Forward to LA Citizen's Credit

Sep 21, 2016

If you are a property owner in Louisiana and you have property insurance, there is a good chance that your policy includes a surcharge named something like "FAIR plan, Coastal Assessment, Market Equalization, or LA Citizen's Assessment"

That surcharge started popping up in most insurance policies right after Hurricane Katrina to cover the overage in cost it took the LA Citizen's Insurance Co to pay for Katrina losses, which is why they decided to refund it--we weren't responsible for paying for the losses that the state-run insurance company had accumulated!

Anyway, it runs anywhere between a few bucks for a renter's insurance policy to a couple of hundred bucks for a nice-sized house or business policy. We wrote a whole blog about it a while back so I don't want to repeat myself.

This is more of a griping blog!

The reason why I used to look forward to this surcharge was because, although it was something we had to pay with our policies, it was totally refunded by the state at the end of the year. We spoke to hundreds of people and discussed this credit and at least a dozen sent out 3-4 years worth of claim forms once we told them about it--those people were so, so happy!

When clients tell me, "don't worry about it, I'll just do it next year..." I tell them, "Hey...that's a nice date-night you're leaving on the table!" I explain that they can also file the stand alone forms (see in our "files" section on our website) and some of them chose to file for it and some didn't. You can't make all the horses drink the water.

That went on from 2005-2014. Last July, the legislature dropped that credit o 72% refundable instead of the old 100%. Since they made it retroactive, those of us who filed after the law passed got cheated since we should've received 100% but we now only got 72% of the credit. All of a sudden it went from "a nice date-night" to "dinner at Chili's"!

Well folks, thanks to the legislature again, you'll be thinking of Chili's while you're eating at Wendy's! On 6/28/16, they passed House Bill 25 and dropped that refundable credit down to 25%. Of course it's retroactive, so us procrastinators get stung again.

I guess that entitlement mentality is so easy to root itself in our minds. The state really could've just never have given us the credit at all. I suppose it's better to eat a Wendy's combo meal than no meal at all!

Category: Bookkeeping

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