Claims Adjusters Are Brainwashed: Public Adjusters Are Not to Be Trusted

During my speech in Dallas yesterday, I asked the audience of public adjusters to raise their hands if they previously worked for insurance companies or insurance claims organizations where the claims training involved role-playing of public adjusters. About 20 people raised their hands.

I called on Chris Faber. Faber holds a CPCU designation. He previously worked for Mercury Insurance Company, American Modern Insurance Group, and as a large loss claims manager for Farmers Insurance. Chris Faber is a credentialed property insurance adjuster with years of experience and training in the insurance industry, long before he became a public insurance adjuster.

He explained that role-playing was a normal part of claims training. It was not just regarding public adjusters, but also role-playing for restoration contractors. Faber explained that virtually all of the role-playing involving public adjusters was to create a perception in the minds of property claims adjusters that a public adjuster could never be trusted, they were greedy, and they always bordered on insurance fraud. In essence, public adjusters were the enemy of the insurance claims adjuster and honest adjustment.

This view of a public adjuster is what property claims management tries to create in the minds of its employees as a cultural belief about public insurance adjusters. Faber explained that after he left Farmers, he made an offer to provide training on another view of public adjusters. He was turned down to make such a presentation.

I am pretty certain that if I called on the others with their hands raised, I would have had a similar description. To be fair and balanced, I invite any insurance industry adjuster or property insurance defense attorney to provide a description of such role-playing if it is different. I am not holding my breath.

The bottom line is that when entering a property insurance adjustment with an adjuster who is not previously acquainted with that public adjuster, all public adjusters should probably assume that the property claims adjuster will view them as somebody close to a distrusted evildoer until proven otherwise. Every public adjuster needs to understand that the person in charge of validating the claim—and the people who will review the claim at the desk level—have this view.

I would suggest that there is a second lesson for the professional public adjusting community as well. It should not tolerate and should publicly stand up against instances where public adjusters are acting fraudulently and dishonestly. Virtually all public adjuster associations require professional and honest actions in their codes of ethics, so I am not suggesting something new. Raising the bar means showing others know where you think that bar is for proper behavior.

Brainwashing in Claims Training

What struck me most about the Dallas discussion was how normalized this conditioning has become. Role-playing is one of the most effective teaching tools because it engages emotions, not just information. When you put a young claims adjuster in a room, hand them a script, and tell them to play out a negotiation where the “public adjuster” is greedy, dishonest, and obstructive, you are not teaching negotiation skills in the abstract. You are hardwiring distrust into the culture of claims.

This is not paranoia. Insurance trade associations, anti-fraud groups, and even state-sponsored training often lump public adjusters in with fraud, kickback schemes, and claim inflation. Industry publications have gone so far as to describe public adjusters as “like sharks to the smell of blood” after catastrophes or “most-detested adversaries” in the courtroom. When you combine that kind of rhetoric with internal role-playing that paints every PA as an enemy, it is no wonder so many staff adjusters approach their first interaction with suspicion instead of professionalism.

The Cost of Making Public Adjusters the “Enemy”

The irony is that the property insurance system is supposed to work best when everyone does their job ethically. Public adjusters are licensed professionals, bound by statutory duties and codes of ethics. Their purpose is to help policyholders—ordinary people who do not know the language of insurance—document and present a claim in a complete manner.

By teaching claims staff to see public adjusters as dishonest by default, insurers create an environment of conflict rather than cooperation. This “us versus them” mindset does real harm:

1. Policyholders pay the price. Instead of a collaborative adjustment process, they get adversarial posturing, delayed payments, and unnecessary disputes.
2. Claims adjusters themselves are shortchanged. They are trained in suspicion rather than in the skills of fair evaluation, open communication, and problem-solving.
3. The insurance industry loses credibility. How can an industry insist it is committed to good faith when it trains its staff to distrust licensed professionals across the table?

Raising the Bar on Both Sides

It would be easy for public adjusters to respond in kind—to treat every staff adjuster as an agent of denial and underpayment. But that would mirror the very culture we are criticizing. The better response is twofold:

1. Confront the bias head-on. Public adjusters need to understand the institutional training behind the suspicion they face. Knowing that distrust is “baked in” helps explain the attitude across the table. Professionalism and transparency are the tools that can chip away at those preconceptions.
2. Raise our own standards. Just as we demand insurers purge bad-faith practices from their ranks, we must ensure our own profession is beyond reproach. Fraudulent or unethical behavior by even a handful of public adjusters feeds the very stereotypes the industry thrives on. Publicly rejecting and policing such behavior is not only ethical, it is strategic.

A Call to the Insurance Industry

I want to issue a challenge to claims executives, training directors, and property insurance defense counsel like Steve Badger. If role-playing exercises about public adjusters are more balanced than what Chris Faber and so many others have described to me, show us the evidence. Publish your training scripts. Let’s see whether you are teaching adjusters to engage in fair negotiations or to start every adjustment assuming the other side is crooked.

Until then, public adjusters should assume they are entering a room where the deck is stacked against them. The burden will always be to prove, by professionalism and persistence, that they are advocates for policyholders, not enemies of fair adjustment.

But make no mistake. The brainwashing of young adjusters to view public adjusters as villains is a stain on the insurance industry. It is time for insurers to examine what they are teaching, and to ask whether indoctrination against an entire profession serves anyone, especially the policyholders whose interests they are supposed to serve.

Thought For The Day 

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche