Think you can track your own certificates of insurance? Take this quiz.

It's harder than you think. And the consequences of not doing it correctly can be significant. Inefficiencies in COI collection, processing and monitoring can lead to huge risk exposures that can quickly translate to costly claims, litigation and possible catastrophe. Be honest with yourself and answer the following questions:

• I am well-versed in insurance rules and law and am comfortable working in this subject area.
• The person in my organization who is assigned the job of actual COI tracking and management is equally competent to do the task correctly.
• Tracking certificates of insurance is a priority in our organization.
• We have allocated the necessary time and resources to make COI tracking a key component of our risk management program.
• We have an established, consistent and accurate procedure in place.
• We have developed and uniformly apply insurance coverage requirements to our vendors based upon their perceived level of risk.
• Our COI management team can properly interpret insurance language contained in legal contracts.
• We continuously and efficiently monitor policy expiration dates on COIs.
• We obtain replacements for expiring COIs before they are expired.
• We can quickly identify those COIs affected by any changes our organization makes to a set of insurance requirements.
• We know what our compliance rate is on a daily basis.
• We can easily identify and report on those COIs not in compliance.
• Our COI management team can properly verify compliance on insurance policy endorsements.
• We have a method to keep all internal parties informed when a non-compliance situation arises.
• We understand the appropriate use of additional insured and waiver of subrogation forms.
• We only accept COIs from the Insured's broker.
• We do not allow any work to be done by the contractor until the COI has been collected and verified that it is in compliance.

If you answer "No" to any of these it's time to re-evaluate your risk management program. Maybe you just need a minor tune-up, maybe not. Whatever the situation, what you don't want to be is someone who finds out the hard way they missed the boat. Insurance compliance verification is a central component of any well-run risk management program. Try to make sure it gets the respect it deserves.