After buying the life insurance policy, your life went on. Eventually, maybe ten years later, maybe twenty or thirty or forty years later, you flat-out forgot that you’d bought an insurance policy. Old folks are forgetful.

Or you moved, and didn’t think to send us your new address.

Or you died, but never told anyone in your family about this policy.

Death is the end for all of us, and it’s why you bought a life insurance policy, but now, the insurance company no longer knows where you live, or even whether you’re alive.

That’s where I come in. I work in the insurance company’s mailroom. We’ve sent you an annual statement concerning your policy, or a past-due notice on your monthly premium, and it’s been returned by the Post Office as undeliverable. It’s my job to try to find your current address, so we can, you know, pay the payout when you die.

One of our main tools for finding lost customers is LexisNexis, the big and downright Orwellian database of almost everyone almost everywhere in America. LexisNexis can cross-reference your name and date-of-birth, and tell us where you’re probably at. Or we can input a valid previous address of yours, and LexisNexis can usually tell us where you now live.

Sounds creepy and it is, but with this tool, we can solve the riddle and find our misplaced customers 95% of the time. That last five percent, though, is an awful lot of people.

And you know what’s the very best info we can input to LexisNexis, to find your whereabouts? Yeah, it’s your Social Security number. It’s uniquely yours — you use it when you work, when you go to college, when you file for public benefits, when you marry, when you divorce, when you declare bankruptcy — and when you die, and it gets reported to LexisNexis every time.

If you’re one of our many, many lost policyholders, and if you gave us your Social Security number when you bought the policy, we can search for those nine digits, and we’re almost certain to find your current address, or the address where you were living when you died.

Or, you can write “refused” on the Social Security line when you buy the policy. We’ll still sell it to you, and you can walk away thinking how you foiled our snoopy forms.

But ten or twenty or forty years later, when we don’t have your address, when you’re near death or dead and your family might not even know you have an insurance policy … we’ll still try to find you, but finding you becomes a lot less likely.

At my company, we have many tens of thousands of “lost” policies, bought and paid for years or decades ago, but we don’t know where the insured lives, or whether he/she is dead or alive. It’s my least favorite part of my job, to mark policies “whereabouts unknown,” but I do it dozens of times every week.

What happens then? Well, if you owe us monthly or annual payments, your policy slips into default. We’ll keep trying to find you, keep sending premium notices and past-due bills, but if we can’t track you down then your policy will lapse, and be cancelled. You’ll be out every dime you’ve ever paid.

If your policy is already paid in full but we don’t know where you are, and your family doesn’t know about your insurance policy, your loved ones will get nada when you die.

All because you didn’t give us your Social Security number.

In closing, let me say again that LexisNexis is inarguably creepy as hell. It knows way too much about way too many of us. It probably ought to be illegal.

Remember, though, me and my co-workers aren’t debt collectors, we’re not the cops, and we’re not stalking you. We’re covered under HIPAA (the privacy law) and we’re not going to sell your data. We’re simply trying to keep you or your family connected with the insurance policy you paid many thousands of dollars to purchase.

No matter how much you value your privacy, with life insurance, you’re rooting for someone to find you. So do yourself and your loved ones a favor, and list you Social Security number on the form.

5/13/2020
Republished 1/30/2025

Company Culture

itsdougholland.com
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