The judge presiding over the Boys Scout of America bankruptcy is weighing a request by insurance companies for permission to serve document requests on 1,400 people who have filed sexual abuse claims and to question scores of them under oath in an effort to determine whether there is widespread fraud in the claims process, the Associated Press reported. The insurance companies maintain that tens of thousands of sexual abuse claims that have been filed in the case appear to be barred by the passage of time based on statutes of limitation in many states. Thousands more lack essential information needed to determine their validity, such as identifying a connection with the Boy Scouts or the name of a perpetrator, according to the insurers. In addition to wanting to question alleged abuse survivors, the insurance companies on Wednesday requested permission to question and collect documents from 15 plaintiffs’ attorneys who personally signed hundreds of claims. Claim forms typically must be signed by the claimants themselves, but in the days leading up to the deadline last November, some attorneys signed several hundred claim forms a day. The insurers contend that a large percentage of attorney-signed claims are missing critical information, and that many appear to be submitted “machine-gun style,” with photocopied attorney signatures and signature pages generated before the proofs of claim were even created. Bankruptcy rules state that by signing a document submitted to the court, an attorney certifies that he or she has reviewed the contents to ensure it has evidentiary support.
