Oops, we forgot to fix your insurance records – our bad!

Imagine being in a car accident and having your insurance company wrongly find you at fault. You then get the at-fault finding overturned, and think your insurance record has been rectified.

Countless Massachusetts residents found that their auto insurance companies never bothered to clean up their insurance records, and they ended up paying premiums based on at-fault accidents in their records.

Massachusetts’s Attorney General, Martha Coakley, announced on Feb. 17 that she has reached a settlement with five insurance companies that failed to update at-fault accident records reported to ChoicePoint, which maintains a giant database of accidents and other claims, called C.L.U.E. (Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange). In these cases, the state’s Board of Appeal overturned at-fault accident findings but they remained in C.L.U.E. and dogged the drivers, who were charged higher insurance premiums as a result of the bad information.

Metropolitan Property & Casualty, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Peerless Insurance, Plymouth Rock Assurance and Pilgrim Insurance were named in the settlement. They’ll pay over $100,000 to the state. Earlier this month, Commerce Insurance reached a similar settlement in Massachusetts.

This could happen no matter where you live. Inaccurate claims information could be hanging out in your C.L.U.E. report and affecting your premiums right now, especially if you were judged at-fault for damage and later exonerated.

If you think an inaccuracy in your C.L.U.E. report could be dogging you, you can order a copy of your own C.L.U.E. report and dispute inaccuracies.