Please Review

One of the insurance companies with whom I work sent out their revised Business Practices & Compliance Guide last week with the subject line:

PLEASE REVIEW

It gives me no pleasure to assign 2 stars out of 5 to this year’s Business Practices and Compliance Guide. The authors take big swings at heavy topics, but produce more whiffs than hits. Exploring the thorniest moral quandaries, peeling the onion of the human pysche— these are commendable pursuits— but the BPCG committed the greatest sin of all: it bored me.

You may not read a better book this year than the BPCG if you want to lose yourself in baroque detail and intellectual navel-gazing, but you will not be invited to feel.

You will be pushed to think.

It will feel like work, but that is only because the Business Practices and Compliance Guide is required reading.

It takes awhile to warm to our protagonist. The reader is meant to inhabit a Willie Lomanesque salt-of-the-earth every-agent, but the individual we meet is guarded, neurotic. He tries to do his best, but he is a guppy among sharks. These dead-eyed predators circle, always lurking around the next page: OFAC, FINRA, CFPB. We learn their names, yes, but what motivates them?

Were they hurt? Were they raised without fathers? Is their love unrequited?

The cast of outlandish supporting players— I’m looking at you, Department of Labor— reads like a wink toward the authors’ hoped-for film adaptation. Extraneous, but catnip to attract the kind of punchy cameos a snoozer like this would need to generate buzz. Darren Criss as California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara?

That I would watch.

Unspoken is whether this year’s Business Practices and Compiance Guide was even necessary. Some less-generous reviewers would call it a barely-edited, cut-and-paste cash grab, the legal equivalent of a child’s flimsy posterboard science fair project. What has changed— do we need to be reminded that fraud is still illegal?

The criticism is fair, but doesn’t assign nearly enough credit to the new font (Calibri). This year’s BPCG is formatted beautifully, and even if you never read it— you will not— I encourage you to open the attached .PDF if only to sign and return the Attestation on the last page.

It’s required.

Far be it from this humble reader to suggest a different jacket or title, but if the insurance company were to ask me to review next year’s Business Practices and Compliance Guide, I’ve got loads of ideas:

Sex sells, guys!