A Florida-based health insurance distributor and its former chief executive officer will pay a total of more than $12 million to settle charges of misrepresenting the robustness of the company’s compliance program while simultaneously misleading investors about numerous customer complaints lodged against it.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) found Health Insurance Innovations (HII) and its former CEO Gavin Southwell made a series of misrepresentations about consumer complaints lodged against the company and one of its main distributors. HII’s compliance department tracked more than 24,000 complaints from 2017-19 regarding third-party insurance agents hired by HII that were misrepresenting plans, failed to cancel plans when customers requested, and charged customers for products they didn’t authorize, according to the SEC’s order.
