legends · 4 min read ·
Exit Interview
An HR exit interview with an insurance claims handler who finds she has been signing off claims for years that have not yet happened.
**Lathom & Reyes Insurance — Exit Interview Record (Confidential).**
**Employee:** Priya Venn, Claims Handler, Grade 4. **Tenure:** 6 years, 2 months.
**Interviewer:** C. Dunmore, HR Business Partner. **Reason for leaving (as stated on form):** Personal.
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**Q1. Why are you leaving?**
A. I'd rather not say on the form. I'll say it to you.
**Q2. Please go ahead.**
A. I've got a cousin. She lives in Leeds. She rang me in August to say she'd had a funny letter from us. I said I'd look it up. I couldn't find it in the system. So I looked at her policy. It was in force. It had been in force for twelve years. I looked at the claims history. There was a claim.
**Q3. Was this an irregular claim?**
A. No. A perfectly ordinary claim for water damage. Paid in full. Signed off by me.
**Q4. Is that unusual?**
A. I didn't handle it. I hadn't got the account. But the sign-off was in my name, in my login, on a date four years before I joined the company.
**Q5. Could that have been a system error?**
A. That's what I thought. I raised a ticket. IT said it was a migration artefact. Fine. But I started to look at the others.
**Q6. The others?**
A. There are a lot. Hundreds. Claims signed off by me before I was employed. Claims signed off by me in the future, I mean, dates that haven't come yet. A claim for a fire next March. A claim for a flood the year after. I looked at the amounts. They're all very small. Just enough to go through without review.
**Q7. Did you speak to your line manager?**
A. I did. She said it was an audit trail and I shouldn't worry. Her name's on some of them too. So is the Chief Executive's. So is everyone's. We're all signing things that haven't happened yet.
**Q8. Do you have a view on what is going on?**
A. I do. I think the claims are real. I think they're paid out of a fund. I think the fund is not money.
**Q9. Can you explain?**
A. I went through the payment instructions. The payee on every one of them is the same. A trust, set up in 1931. It's not a bank. It has an address. I went there.
**Q10. You visited?**
A. On a Saturday. A building in the old part of the city. A plain brick building with a brass plate. There was a man at a desk in the hall. He asked whether I was claiming or paying. I said I wasn't sure. He said it was usually one or the other.
**Q11. What did he mean?**
A. I asked. He said every policy is a promise: that a thing will be made good. And that something has to be made good by somebody. Every claim that's paid is paid out of someone else's future. Some quiet future that never gets lived. He said insurance is the oldest trade in the world and the only one that deals in exactly what it says.
**Q12. I'm not sure that's relevant to your resignation.**
A. It is. He showed me a ledger. My name was on a page. Not as an employee. As a premium.
**Q13. A premium?**
A. A premium. He said I'd been paying in from the very start. Small instalments. A few hours here and there. A bad day. A year off the end. He said the company had been very good to me. He said that everything I'd been spared, a car crash at nineteen, a growth they'd found in time, had been covered. He said it was a good policy.
**Q14. Did you ask what the premiums were?**
A. He showed me. It was a list of dates. Next to each one a small amount of time. The last entry on the page is dated tomorrow. It's for the whole remaining balance.
**Q15. Ms. Venn, I think we should end the interview here. Is there anything else you'd like noted?**
A. Yes. I'd like it noted that I handed in my notice because I wanted to cancel. I wanted to see if I could. I was told by the man at the desk that cancellation is possible in the first fourteen days, that the cooling-off period had passed years ago, and that on leaving the company's employment, my cover would terminate immediately.
**Q16. And that concerns you?**
A. Doesn't it concern you? I'm leaving at five. I'd like it noted that I was perfectly healthy this morning. I'd like it noted that I'd like to be covered.
*[Interview closed 16:20. Ms. Venn's access badge was deactivated at 17:00. She was last seen leaving the building at 17:04. The insurer has no record of any claim on her behalf.]*