Oklahoma P&C Study Guide

There is one Oklahoma property and casualty fact that a well-prepared candidate is more likely to get wrong than an unprepared one, because the wrong answer is what every national course teaches. The guaranty association cap is $150,000, not $300,000.

The guaranty association — four limbs, three units of measurement

36 O.S. §2007(A)(1) is where the money is. Read it slowly, because the subsection changes units three times:

• Workers’ compensation — “the full amount of a covered claim.” Uncapped.
• Unearned premium — “an amount not exceeding Ten Thousand Dollars ($10,000.00) per policy.”
• All other covered claims — “an amount not exceeding One Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars ($150,000.00) per claimant … except for claims relating to a cybersecurity insurance policy.”
• Cybersecurity — since 1 November 2025, “in no event … an amount in excess of Three Hundred Thousand Dollars ($300,000.00) for all first- and third-party claims under a policy or endorsement providing … cybersecurity insurance coverage and arising out of or related to a single insured event.”

Per claimant. Per policy. Per event. Three different measuring sticks in one subsection.

The net-worth exclusion is two sections away

If an exam item asks where the high-net-worth exclusion lives, the intuitive answers — the definitions section or the powers section — are both wrong. §2004(7)(c)(4) merely excludes from “covered claim” any claims excluded “pursuant to Section 2020.2 of this title due to the high net worth of an insured.” The rule itself is in §2020.2, a decimal-suffixed sibling section.

Read its operator: net worth that “exceeds Fifty Million Dollars ($50,000,000.00)” — so exactly $50 million is not excluded. It is measured as “the aggregate net worth of the insured and all of its subsidiaries and affiliates as calculated on a consolidated basis,” as of 31 December of the year prior to the insurer’s insolvency. And the Association may recover from a high-net-worth insured everything it paid on that insured’s behalf.

One more date limit worth carrying: §2004(7)(c) excludes claims filed “later than eighteen (18) months after the date of the order of liquidation.”

The claim-handling clocks — 30, 60, 60, 120

Oklahoma’s Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Act scopes its main clocks, by their own text, to property and casualty insurers:

• §1250.6(A) — acknowledge a claim within 30 days of notification, “unless payment is made within such period of time.” And in the same subsection: “Notification given to an agent of a property and casualty insurer shall be notification to the insurer.”
• §1250.7(A) — accept, deny, or advise that further investigation is needed within 60 days after receipt of properly executed proofs of loss. A denial must be in writing and cite the specific policy provision.
• §1250.7(C) — complete the investigation within 60 days after notification of proof of loss, with a hard outer cap of 120 days after receipt of proof of loss, fraud and arson excepted.

The two sixty-day clocks are in different subsections and run from different events. Do not merge them.

The clock that reaches producers

Most of this Act binds insurers. §1250.4(B) does not: “Any person subject to the jurisdiction of the Commissioner, upon receipt of any inquiry from the Commissioner shall, within twenty (20) calendar days from the date of receipt of the inquiry, furnish the Commissioner with an adequate response.” The Commissioner may extend it “for up to seven (7) additional calendar days” for good cause, and “any inquiry or response subject to this subsection shall be delivered electronically.”

That is the producer hook, and it has teeth: §1435.13(A)(15) makes “failing to respond to an inquiry from the Department as required” an independent ground to censure, suspend, revoke or refuse a licence.

Single act or general business practice? Both.

The national baseline is a single “general business practice” threshold. §1250.3(B) is disjunctive: an act is an unfair claim settlement practice if “it is committed flagrantly and in conscious disregard” of the Act or “has been committed with such frequency as to indicate a general business practice.” One flagrant act is enough — frequency is not required. Both limbs sit in the same subsection, as paragraphs 1 and 2.

Bad faith is judicial, and the Act creates no private right

Oklahoma’s bad-faith tort comes from a case, not a statute: Christian v. American Home Assurance Co., 1977 OK 141, 577 P.2d 899 — an insurer “has an implied duty to deal fairly and act in good faith with its insured,” and violation of that duty “gives rise to an action in tort” for consequential and, in a proper case, punitive damages.

The Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Act gives a policyholder no cause of action. Note the mechanism carefully, because it is a fair exam question: no Title 36 section expressly forecloses one. The bar comes from case law. And conduct that violates the Act can still be evidence of bad faith in a Christian claim.

Three penalty ceilings, three different actors

These get merged constantly, and they should not be:

• Producer — “not more than One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00) for each occurrence” (§1435.13(D))
• Insurer, under the UCSPA — “not less than $100.00 nor more than Five Thousand Dollars ($5,000.00)” per occurrence (§1250.14)
• A person barred from the business of insurance — “not more than Ten Thousand Dollars ($10,000.00) for each act of violation and for each day of violation” (§402), a conjunctive operator that stacks two ways

And one number that is not a penalty at all: the $150 OK-MAP charge is a flat annual membership assessment on every insurer licensed for both property and casualty lines.