When he hit a car that blew through a stop sign, Aaron “Sparky” Wilhelm never imagined the offending driver’s automobile insurance company could make him pay to repair damage his truck suffered in the accident.

Now he’s not so sure. And Wilhelm, Lawrence, is one of hundreds of Kansas motorists complaining about the practices of the state’s second-largest auto insurer.

Dave Sehorn, right, general manager of Hite Collision Repair Center, 3401 W. Sixth St., talks with Aaron Sparky Wilhelm, about his truck. The vehicle needs 2,000 worth of work, but the insurance company of the person who caused the wreck is not willing to pick up the whole tab.

The Kansas Insurance Commissioner’s Office last week confirmed it was planning a formal review of Farmers Insurance Group’s claims-handling procedures.

“We sent them a notification letter Aug. 14. By law, they’re entitled to a 45-day notice,” said Vicki Buening, a spokeswoman for the commissioner’s office.

In the past few months, Buening said, regulators have seen a spike in complaints against Farmers.

“On an average day, we get between 80 and 100 calls on our complaint line,” she said. “Right now, about one-third of those calls are about Farmers.”

Wilhelm, 25, called in one of those complaints.

On a Sunday morning six weeks ago, Wilhelm was driving into Lawrence on the county road that becomes Haskell Avenue when a westbound car drove through a stop sign.

“I was going 55 mph, I didn’t have time to even honk the horn. I hit her broadside,” said Wilhelm, who owns Diamond Cabinetry and Wood Products, 2912 Yellowstone Drive.

$12,000 in damage

The other car, a 1996 Pontiac Sunbird driven by Joyce Curry of Eudora, landed upside down in the east ditch. It was a total loss.

Wilhelm’s 1999 three-quarter ton pickup truck careened into the west ditch.

“It pretty much mangled my front end,” he said. Repairs, he later learned, would cost $12,000.

Because he had not caused the accident, Wilhelm expected Curry’s insurance company, Farmers Insurance Group, to pay for the repairs.

But the company’s Overland Park-based adjuster offered to pay only 75 percent of the bill, leaving Wilhelm responsible for the remaining 25 percent.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Wilhelm said. “And then he said they were giving me a good deal because they usually did 65 percent. He said I could fight it, but I’d have to go to court and I’d lose. He said he’d seen it a million times.”

Wilhelm said the adjuster encouraged him to have his insurance company pick up the remaining 25 percent, even though that meant Wilhelm would have had to pay his $500 deductible, and his insurer, Allied Insurance, would probably raise his premiums.

“I kept saying ‘No, no, I shouldn’t have to pay for this. This is wrong,'” Wilhelm said.

Finally, he called the state insurance commissioner’s office.

A familiar tale

“I got referred to a guy and we talked for about a minute, and then he kind of laughed and said, ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. You’re calling about Farmers?'”

Contacted by the Journal-World, Farmers’ executive director for Kansas, Jim Harwood, said he’d not heard that company adjusters were suspected of trying to get claimants to accept responsibility for accidents.

“If that were the case, it would certainly be disconcerting,” he said.

Farmers’ adjusters, he said, do not enter settlement negotiations with a preconceived notion of how much the company should or should not pay.

“That is not happening,” he said. “There is no blanket-type policy, none whatsoever.”

Harwood said he expected the company to have little trouble passing the insurance commissioner’s review.

“Once we find out what they’re looking for and what the issues are, I’m confident this will all be resolved,” he said. “Reviews of this kind are not unusual.”

Farmers, the state’s second-largest auto insurer, writes 12 percent of the state’s auto insurance policies. State Farm Insurance is the biggest, with 20 percent.

At the insurance commissioner’s office, Buening said, regulators want to know how Farmers figures its share of fault and liability.

Cost-cutting tool

“As regulators, our role is to make sure claims are being handled fairly,” she said.

Depending on the findings, Buening said the commissioner’s office had the authority to order Farmers to mend its ways, impose fines or both.

Since the mid-1990s, most states, including Kansas, have passed laws allowing insurance companies to haggle over how much liability they’ll assume for their clients’ losses in accidents such as Wilhelm’s.

Though meant to give insurance companies more leeway in settling claims, many insurance agents now say the process called “comparative negligence” has become a tool for cutting costs.

“Until about two years ago, I’d never heard of a company saying ‘We’ll go 75-25,’ when it was clear who’d caused the accident,” said Chris Chapin, an agent at Stephens Insurance in Lawrence. “But now I’d have to say it happens all the time. A lot of companies do it.”

Chapin, who is Wilhelm’s insurance agent, said he objected to his client and Allied Insurance picking up 25 percent of the costs related to an accident his client didn’t cause. But he also knows that hiring lawyers and going to court to fight Farmers would cost even more.

“The process is supposed to be based on the facts, but it’s turned into something that’s pretty arbitrary,” he said. “That’s unfortunate because it’s the customer who suffers.”