The Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) has announced substantial savings in its handling of personal injury claims.
Speaking at the publication of PIAB's first annual report today, chief executive Patricia Byron said savings will grow substantially over the coming months.
PIAB was set up to reduce litigation costs associated with delivering personal injury compensation. These costs contributed significantly to spiralling insurance premiums in Ireland, and claimants usually had to wait three to four years for their compensation claims to be settled.
Assessments to date under the board have been delivered about three times faster and at a delivery charge four times cheaper than under the litigation system, according to the PIAB.
Three out of every four PIAB assessments have been accepted and the total compensation awarded so far amounts to €2.7 million.
The cost of delivering this compensation under the PIAB system amounted to €185,000.
Under the old litigation system, costs would have been approximately €1.2 million, representing a PIAB saving of €1.1 million, the report noted.
Ms Byron said that 13,000 applications had been received from victims of accidents, the majority of which were received in 2005. Five thousand of these claims have either been settled up-front between parties following PIAB's intervention, or claim papers are being submitted by the claimant.
The remaining 8,000 are at various stages of the nine-month assessment process.
Commenting that the claims environment has changed significantly, Ms. Byron said that personal injury cases in the High Court had fallen from 11,245 in 2003 to 15,293 in 2004 to 297 in 2005 year to date.
Director of Consumer Affairs Carmel Foley welcomed the publication of the report.
She said the speed at which the PIAB had become operational and its self-financing concept had enabled it to bring speedy and comprehensive solutions to insurance claims that would otherwise have gone through the courts at considerable cost in time and money to many claimants.
"In particular I am gratified to see the considerable decline in the number of High Court personal injury cases this year; this augurs well for the development, in other areas of costly litigation, for the expansion of alternative dispute resolution." she said.