The Florida Senate has demanded that two newspapers stop using and destroy copies of a regulatory analysis of property-insurer finances, warning that continued possession or publication could carry civil or criminal consequences. The demand, reported by the Orlando Sentinel, adds a records-access dispute to a broader argument over how Florida oversees payments between insurers and affiliated companies.
The report was commissioned by Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation and prepared by Risk & Regulatory Consulting after a review of 53 property insurers. Consultant Jan Moenck testified that the firm submitted a final draft to the agency on April 1, 2022, and that the document remained labeled as a draft while awaiting client review, according to Insurance Journal. Former Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier and current Commissioner Michael Yaworsky have described the analysis as incomplete or flawed, while the Sentinel reported that the agency had withheld the report.
What the analysis found—and what it did not
The newspapers reported that insurers recorded $432 million in losses from 2017 through 2019 while affiliated companies recorded about $1.3 billion in net income during the same period. The review also found that affiliated managing general agents charged between 20% and 34% of premiums at some companies, with total affiliated fees reaching as high as 63% of premiums, according to the Sentinel's account. Insurance Journal reported that the consultant classified fees as fair and reasonable below 110% of an insurer's combined net income, flagged the 110% to 115% range for additional information, and treated fees at or above 115% as not fair and reasonable.
Those figures do not by themselves establish that affiliate payments caused higher premiums, insurer failures or regulatory violations. Insurance Journal reported that the consultant did not make those causal determinations and told a lawmaker that it had not identified practices violating state rules. Yaworsky has also said that some insurers did not provide all requested information, limiting the report's completeness, according to Miami Times.
The records fight
The newspapers later obtained the full analysis through public-records requests. The Sentinel reported that the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times obtained an executive summary in 2025 and that the full report was later released by the Senate. The Senate then demanded that the news organizations stop using the records and destroy all copies immediately, attributing their release to an administrative mistake and warning that further use could constitute a third-degree felony.
The newspapers said they obtained the records through the public-records process. First Amendment scholar Ken Paulson told the Sentinel that the Senate's demand raises serious press-freedom and public-records questions, including whether officials can compel journalists to destroy material that government personnel released. The legal consequences of the demand remain unresolved in the reporting cited here.
Florida already has an oversight framework for affiliates
Florida law separately recognizes that managing general agents can require scrutiny alongside the insurers they serve. Under the 2025 Florida Insurance Code, certain post-hurricane market-conduct examinations of property insurers must also examine the insurer's managing general agent as if it were the insurer, according to the Florida Senate's statutory text. That provision provides regulatory context for the debate, but it does not validate the disputed report's methodology or show that any particular fee arrangement caused an insolvency.
The state's receivership records provide a separate, limited point of context. The Florida Department of Financial Services lists Avatar Property and Casualty Insurance Company and FedNat Insurance Company among companies in the rehabilitation or liquidation process, but the department's list does not attribute those proceedings to affiliate payments, according to its receivership records. Their inclusion therefore cannot, on its own, resolve the central question raised by the report.
The Florida House has held hearings and passed measures aimed at greater oversight of affiliate payments and insurer financial disclosures, while those measures died in the Senate, the Sentinel reported. Further hearings are expected. The immediate dispute is thus over access to a contested document; the larger policy question is whether Florida's existing examination and disclosure rules give regulators and policyholders enough information to evaluate money moving between an insurer and its affiliates.
