27 March 2024
The Insurance Authority (IA) has imposed a twelve-month ban on former insurance agent Mr Wong Chung Yiu (Mr Wong) for witnessing his client sign a false signature, making false declarations and signing false signatures himself.
The case begins in September 2020, when a policy holder instructed Mr Wong to migrate his existing medical insurance policy to a Voluntary Health Insurance Scheme (VHIS) policy. The policy holder’s daughter was the insured under existing policy and, to migrate to the new VHIS policy both father (as policy holder) and daughter (as insured) had to sign the application. The daughter, however, was not in Hong Kong. To proceed with the application, the father signed not only in his own capacity as the policy holder, but also as if he was his daughter (in effect, forging her signature as the insured). He did this in the presence of Mr Wong, who also signed the application (as the serving agent) to confirm that he had verified the identity of the proposed insured (the daughter), interviewed her and personally visited his residence. Mr Wong had done none of these things. Nevertheless, he made these false declarations and submitted the application to the insurer. The application was unsuccessful as no premium was paid.
A few months on, in January 2021, the father engaged Mr Wong again to purchase another VHIS policy for his daughter, this time with the daughter as the policy holder and insured. The daughter was still not in Hong Kong. To proceed with the application, the father (again) signed his daughter’s signature in various places on the application which was being processed using Mr Wong’s tablet. Observing that the father was encountering difficulties with this, Mr Wong signed the daughter’s signature in three places himself. He also made the same declarations as before with regards to having verified the daughter’s identity, interviewed her and visited her residence. These declarations were still untrue the second time around.
This time the application was successful, but the insurance policy was issued to the daughter. The daughter, realising that she could not have purchased the policy as she was not in Hong Kong at the time, raised the issue with the insurer, at which point the truth of Mr Wong’s misconduct was revealed.
This case shows an insurance agent who has convinced himself that “the end justifies the means”, the end being achieving the father’s aim of procuring insurance for his daughter (a noble objective), the means being to accomplish this by way of falsifying signatures and making false declarations (which is totally unacceptable). Forgery and making false statements are never justified when it comes to procuring insurance. Not only is this simply unethical, it provides a basis for the insurance policy to be vitiated from the outset and thereby totally fails to accomplish the end of legally binding insurance coverage which is the original objective. An insurance agent who does this completely fails his client, displays a lack of understanding of the good faith principle that forms the basis of all insurance policies and demonstrates an absence of integrity as to make him entirely untrustworthy. Such an agent is deserving of disciplinary action, especially given the erosion of ethics on display in this case, where the agent in a mere matter of months had descended from witnessing a father falsifying his daughter’s signature, to stepping in to falsify the signatures himself.
To Mr Wong’s credit, he has subsequently shown contrition for his actions and was cooperative in accepting the disciplinary action which has resulted in prompt resolution of this matter. This does not excuse his conduct, but it serves as a mitigating factor which the IA has taken into account in calibrating the level of penalty.
In deciding the disciplinary sanction to be imposed under the Insurance Ordinance (Cap. 41), the IA has weighed all relevant circumstances in the balance, including that:
For further information on the IA’s enforcement work, please see the “Enforcement News” section of the IA’s website. Public disciplinary actions against licensed insurance intermediaries may also be searched on the “Register of Licensed Insurance Intermediaries” on the IA’s website.
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