11 FAQs About How Jones Reviews COIs and Endorsements for Compliance

Table of Contents

1. Excess Follows Form Endorsements
2. Evidence of Additional Insured
3. Blanket Additional Insured
4. Contractual Privity Language
5. Multiple COIs
6. Declaration Pages
7. Arising Out Of Verbiage
8. Umbrella Liability Coverage
9. Self-Insurance
10. Waivers of Subrogation for Property Insurance
11. Schedule Endorsements

1. How does Jones handle “Excess follows form” verbiage for Additional Insured?

Jones will only accept Excess Follows Form verbiage as sufficient for Additional Insured if the client states that they’d accept it, otherwise it would be marked as a gap.

When checking follow form endorsements, the Jones team also ensures that the policy being modified doesn’t actually have the scope of its effectiveness restricted by the follow form verbiage. If an underlying policy has a narrower scope of effectiveness than the umbrella, we don’t want to limit the amount of coverage our customer is potentially offered, and will flag this to our customers.

Refresher: What are Excess Follows Form endorsements?

A useful tool to modify excess or umbrella liability to ensure it covers exactly the same scope of claims as the underlying policy it serves in excess of. In the event of a claim that exhausts the limits of an underlying CGL policy the excess funds disbursed to cover the damages are “subject to the same terms, conditions, exclusions, definitions and agreements” as the underlying coverage. 

2. Do you look for Additional Insured in the checkboxes on the COI, Description of Operations, or on a separate endorsement?

The Jones team typically does not accept the checkbox alone as evidence of Additional Insured. 

By default, the Jones team is strict with Additional Insureds and will mark even slight misspellings or errors as noncompliant due to the importance of AI status. Some customers find the checkbox to be sufficient, others require CG 2010 and CG 2037 endorsements (or their equivalents) to evidence Additional Insured status. 

Note: We never mark gaps for missing Additional Insured in the Description of Operations in the states of Georgia, Oregon, and Texas, as the law in these states makes it illegal for an insurance broker to edit the DoO to add Additional Insured parties who are not listed on the underlying policy. 

3. What about accepting Blanket Additional Insured?

The Jones team works with our customers to determine when it is and isn’t acceptable for Additional Insured status to be conferred via blanket endorsements.

Blanket Additional Insured endorsements that automatically provide coverage to any party to which the named insured is contractually required to provide coverage are a useful tool to effectively transfer risk while also simplifying the compliance process. Some customers appreciate the simplicity of blanket Additional Insured status as a means to ensure projects aren’t ground to a halt over wrangling a few Additional Insured names on a COI. On the flip side, other organizations prefer the specificity of named Additional Insured to satisfy their own risk appetite. 

4. Is the Jones team familiar with contractual privity language?

The Jones insurance document review team is well versed in all types of contractual privity verbiage and uses our endorsement index to ensure any endorsement submitted to our GC customers meet their unique requirements around Additional Insured.

5. Can Jones handle multiple COIs for one subcontractor, tenant, or vendor?

Yes, we regularly handle multiple COIs for one subcontractor, tenant, or vendor.

Requiring multiple COIs for one subcontractor is a practice Jones is well acquainted with and is capable of supporting. Many of our GC customers require multiple COIs in order to ensure coverage is conferred to the owner of the project as well as to the GC. The way our software groups insurance documents ensures that our team is able to keep the COIs and endorsements organized for GCs, which is one key part of using Jones as a subcontractor compliance management tool.

6. Does the Jones team handle declaration pages as well as COIs?

Yes, but it’s up to our customers if they choose to accept them or not.

When it comes to the rules your organization chooses to adopt around declaration pages Jones is flexible and capable of adapting to your needs. Some smaller subcontractors and businesses submit declaration pages in lieu of COIs, and Jones auditors are able to review and extract relevant insurance information from them. By standard we extract them as evidencing insurance coverage, but defer to individual customer organizations whether they’re enough for subcontractor compliance, if additional endorsements are needed, or if they shouldn’t be accepted at all in lieu of a COI. 

7. Are your Jones insurance document reviewers familiar with “arising out of” verbiage?

The Jones team is well versed in arising out of language.

Jones is able to take granular auditing notes from customers and apply them to all insurance document reviews done on their behalf. One of our GC customers is particularly strict about requiring “arising out of” verbiage in opposition to “caused by.” These two terms look similar, but are not exactly the same in regards to the breadth of what they cover. While “caused by” has an element of direct causality, “arising out of” is more broad and means that the accident that caused the claim does not require cause in the legal sense, which expands the scope of coverage.

This understanding of arising out of verbiage comes in handy when we have to check endorsements like GA 472 09 18s for customers. At face value, this endorsement only confers Additional Insured for damage “caused, in whole or in part, by the performance of [their] ongoing operations,” which is too narrow and would not suffice the requirements for the customer mentioned about. However, we know that subsequent verbiage in the GA 472 09 18 states that if required by the underlying contract all “caused by” language could be replaced with “arising out of” language, meaning the endorsement did suffice for our customer’s requirements. 

8. How does the Jones team use Umbrella Liability to cover shortfalls in other policies?

By default, Jones insurance document reviewers will use umbrella liability to supplement:

• General liability 
• Auto liability
• Employer’s liability 

Jones insurance document reviewers by default will NOT accept umbrella to cover shortfalls for: 

• Pollution liability
• Professional liability 
• Crime liability

However, this policy can be adjusted in discussion with the Jones insurance auditing team during our auditing standards review call.

9. How does Jones handle self-insurance?

By default Jones will not accept self-insurance, except for when it is provided by a government entity.

Unless explicitly stated by a customer the Jones auditing team will not accept self-insurance. Certain customer organizations do choose to accept self-insurance in very fringe situations, and these can be covered and identified in advance in our auditing standards review calls.

10. How does Jones handle Waivers of Subrogation for property insurance?

Jones does not mark gaps for Waiver of Subrogation for property insurance on any account, even when it appears in the lease. Why? Because no such endorsement exists. The usual practice is to handle rights of recovery by the lease wording itself, not by an endorsement to the policy. The lease, as a binding contract containing a Waiver of Subrogation, fulfills this requirement when signed. 

11. How does the Jones team review schedule endorsements for compliance?

We flag empty schedule boxes as gaps unless our customers direct us to otherwise.

Jones is capable of flagging gaps for schedule endorsements to match the risk tolerance of our customers. Schedule endorsements provide coverage to specific person(s) or organization(s) and specify the location of covered operations in the schedule box. As a standard practice, where endorsements are required, the Jones team accepts blanket endorsements. However, if a schedule endorsement is provided and the schedule box is left empty, Jones will flag it as incomplete. In such cases Jones will request the inclusion of blanket verbiage in the schedule. Some customers however request that we do not reject endorsements with blank schedules.

Get in touch with us via the form below to find out more about how Jones can help your organization more effectively insulate itself from insurance risk with better COI tracking today.