Business & Professional Insurances

Liability

• Public & Products Liability Insurance
• Product Recall
• Professional Indemnity
• Directors & Officers
• Employment Practices
• Tax Audit

Public & Products Liability Insurance

Liability insurance provides protection for you and your assets against legal actions taken by third parties for personal injury and/or property damage following an accident arising out of the conduct of your business.

This insurance also protects your legal costs incurred in defending such actions against you which can be very costly – in some cases more than the original damage itself.

The standard public/products liability  policy provides cover for:

Physical Damage to your property or personal injury but does not generally cover:

• Financial loss only where there has been no injury or damage to property
• Fines & penalties from government authorities. (Statutory Liability)

At Fitzpatrick & Co we have a solution and can provide specialised extensions ( in most instances ) that will give you added protection .

These extensions can be provided at a reasonable cost and certainly are value for money .

Financial Loss

Financial Loss cover is aimed principally for those who manufacture & supply a product and provides cover for a claim that may arise for financial loss from the product where there has been no personal injury or property damage.

An example of this cover may be :

• A product not working in the way represented that it would work
• Incorrect statements or exaggerations of performance given by sales & marketing
• Incorrect or wrongful instructions and advice provided in relation to a product and its application or use.

Statutory Liability

Most business owners or managers would have no idea that there are over 5000 legislative provisions in this country that cater for civil penalties. Nor would they know that fines for Occupational Health and Safety breaches can be as high as $550,000.

Fines for breaches of Environmental Law can be even more punitive – some reaching as high as $5.5 million.

Fines of that size could easily drive many businesses to the wall.

Product Recall

As a manufacturer and supplier of goods there could be serious financial consequences to your company if your products needed to be recalled from the market due to faulty design, safety reasons etc.

There is insurance cover available for most products.

Summary of options available:

Product Recall - provides reimbursement of expenses incurred by the insured for advertising in newspapers on radio or television, transportation costs for the return of the products to the insured because their use may cause a potential legal liability claim for third party bodily injury or property damage (public liability).

Product Guarantee - this includes coverage for the cost of removal, recovery, repair treatment or replacement of products which fail to perform the function for which they were manufactured, sold ,supplied, installed delivered etc by or on behalf of the insured.

Financial Loss Cover - pertains to financial loss to the third party as the result of a products failure to perform its intended function including third party recall costs.

Professional Indemnity Insurance

Professional Indemnity

Professional Indemnity insurance protects a professional from financial loss, injury or damage arising from a mistake or failure by the professional to exercise the required level of skill. A professional may also be held to be liable for a mistake even though there was no negligence.

Who is a Professional?

Anyone who provides to another person advice and/or services of a skilful character, according to an established discipline, can be regarded as a 'professional'. That means persons other than those in traditional professions such as doctors, lawyers, accountants are now considered to be professionals i.e. computer consultants, advertising agents, trade associations, project managers etc.

The standard public/products liability cover will generally include cover in respect of advice given in conjunction with your product where there is no "fee for service": charged. However once you provide advice/designs/reports and a separate "fee for service" is charged there would be no cover and you would need to take out a separate professional indemnity policy.

Claims Made:

Professional Indemnity policies provide indemnity on a ‘claims made’ basis, which means that claims first advised to you (or made against you) and reported to your insurer during the period of insurance are covered, irrespective of when the incident causing the claim occurred, subject to any clauses relating to a retroactive date.

In order to ensure that any entitlement to indemnity under the policy is protected, you must therefore report all incidents that may give rise to a claim against you to the insurers without delay after such incidents come to your attention and prior to the expiration of the policy period.

Directors & Officers Liability Insurance

As a manager/director of a company whether part time honorary or full time there is a significant risk attached to your day to day activities associated with the running and management of the company.

The threat of personal litigation against directors of organizations has increased dramatically over recent years and the trend is set to continue.

Directors are in a position of great power & responsibility and have been held to be increasingly accountable. It is therefore important for directors/officers to ensure they protect their personal assets & liabilities should a claim arise as the result of a wrongful act committed by them in the course of performing their duties.

What is a wrongful act?

Defined to include any actual or alleged breach of duty, breach of trust, neglect, error, misstatement etc.

Sources of claims:

• Breach of duty/neglect
• Trade practices/fair trading legislation
• Insolvent trading
• Mergers & acquisitions
• Shareholder disputers
• Employee claims – unfair dismissal, sexual harassment, discrimination
• Regulatory authorities
• Breach of contract

We recommend that you consider insuring your personal liabilities under a directors & officers liability policy.

It is not the intention of a D & O policy to indemnify the company for any claims made against it.

Claims made:

A directors & officers policy is a claims made policy - What does this mean?

Claims made policies require all claims, facts or incidents that may give rise to a claim to be notified to the insurer within the period of insurance.

Employment Practices

Employment Practices Liability Insurance can be purchased in conjunction with a Directors & Officers liability cover or a stand alone.

Examples of cover provided by the EPL policy are:

• Wrongful dismissal, failure to promote Harassment, Discrimination due to
• race colour marital status gender age etc.
• Wrongful termination failure to promote, refusal to employ and/or demotion
• Harassment, including invasion of privacy
• Unlawful discrimination due to race, colour, national extraction, marital status, mentaldisability, sex, age, physical disability etc
• Defamation of character; Libel and/or slander
• Damages, which includes humiliation, mental anguish claims the third party suffers
• Legal costs in defending an allegation

Tax Audit Insurance

The tax commissioner has predicted that one in ten businesses particularly small to medium sized enterprises will be subject to some form of tax audit.

This has led to an increased number of ATO field audits on businesses, individuals and self-managed superannuation funds.

Each audit can lead to additional work for your accountant leading to costs of thousands of dollars to you.

The good news is you can now insure for these costs.

Policies not only cover audits from the ATO but can also provide cover for audits conducted by the workcover authorities.