ICBC whistleblower pleased estimator cuts being restored

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SURREY (NEWS 1130) – More work is being done to douse what BC’s Attorney General has been calling a “financial dumpster fire” at ICBC.

Forty-three of the 60 estimators David Eby promised in February have been hired and 17 more will be trained by the end of the year with hope of bringing repair costs down.

Last fall, whistleblower Lance Leswick reached out to NEWS 1130 to report his complaints about some body shops inflating claims were never adequately addressed by the former Liberal government.

“But now the managers are actually stepping in, going to the shops, reviewing the times and if the manager feels or agrees with the estimators or somewhere in there, he’ll actually lower the time on those estimates — which is — it’s about time because it’s been going on way too long.”

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Leswick, who’s based in Surrey, first reached out to NEWS 1130 last fall to report irregularities he’d been logging since 2001.

“It’s been frustrating for all the estimators in the corporation. We were told back in 2001 that they were just going to get rid of the estimators. As we retired, they wouldn’t be hiring anymore, but I think the costs just got too far out of control. We just have to try to get the costs under control and I know people screamed that they want private insurance companies and that to take over, but I’ve never heard of one private insurance company ever saying they want to come in and take over ICBC’s injury claims.”

Attorney General David Eby says turnaround times for responses have already dropped and ICBC currently has approximately 250 estimators, but that’s still down from more than 300 working in-house back in 2001.

Leswick says he doesn’t believe more estimators would have been hired this year if the former Liberal government was still in power.

“It’s about time. I thought that for many, many years, so until NEWS 1130 broke the story, it wasn’t going to happen. Actually, we have two trainees in our office right now. It’s been really good to be able to show them, you know, how it works on this side.”

Since December 2016, ICBC has added 115 estimators, but Eby says the 43 hired in February are the first fully-engaged trainee group since 2002.

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