Price Optimization Letter Responses

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the New York Freedom of Information Law, I hereby request the following records:

I'm a reporter with a news organization called the Markup. Under New York's Freedom of Information Law, I am seeking all documents and records regarding the responses DFS received to a questionnaire sent out in 2015 regarding companies' use of "price optimization" to set insurance rates. 

Here is a link to DFS's letter:

https://us.eversheds-sutherland.com/portalresource/NY-308-Letter.pdf

More specifically, I am seeking all the responses sent by insurance companies to this letter, as well as all communication produced or circulated internally about those responses--both circulated within the Department and those with external parties (like other government agencies and private organizations). 

I seek all responsive records regardless of format, medium, or physical characteristics. In conducting your search, please understand the term “communications” in its broadest sense, to include any written, typed, recorded, graphic, printed, or audio material. I seek records of any kind, including electronic records, audiotapes, videotapes, and photographs, as well as letters, emails, facsimiles, telephone messages, voice mail messages and transcripts, notes, or minutes of any meetings, telephone conversations or discussions. My request includes any attachments to these records. No category of material should be omitted from search, collection, and production.

I am seeking expedited processing on this request. Since I am investigating the continued use of non-risk-based pricing in the industry, any information gleamed from these documents would provide me with greater insight into how policyholders around the country are still being harmed. Having these documents in hand sooner rather than later could put a halt to these ongoing, and potentially discriminatory, harms.

In the event some portions of the requested records are properly exempt from disclosure, please disclose any reasonably segregable nonexempt portions of the requested records. If it is your position that a document contains non-exempt segments, but that those non-exempt segments are so dispersed throughout the document as to make segregation impossible, please state what portion of the document is non-exempt, and how the material is dispersed throughout the document. 

Please institute a preservation hold on information responsive to this request.


As a member of the news media, I am seeking this information for dissemination to the general public as part of an effort to examine insurance pricing in the United States. This request is made in the public interest and not for commercial use.

As such, I am requesting a fee waiver of search and review fees as a member of the news media.

If this fee waiver is not granted, please notify me if document retrieval and reproduction costs exceed $100.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 5 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Aaron Sankin