A Prevention Fund in Insurance Activity

Abstract

The article presents specific features of the prevention fund, discusses both an accounting and a tax approach to the treatment of expenditure on prevention, as well as examines the importance of marketing activities in insurance prevention and indicates various similarities and differences. The activities financed from the prevention fund can also play an important role in shaping the price of a product, thereby influencing the overall technical result. A certain preventive action included in the product price may become a part of an insurance offer. A possible marketing aspect of using the prevention fund is only an indirect consequence of expenditure from the fund, incurred by the insurance company in accordance with its statutory purpose. In addition to that, the authors discuss the possibility of transferring the fund's resources to policyholders so that they can meet preventive objectives in the light of Article 18 (1) of the Insurance and Reinsurance Activity Act, according to which in the case of insurance for someone else's account, the policyholder receives neither remuneration nor other benefits in connection with offering insurance protection nor activities related to the performance of an insurance contract. Prevention activities are targeted at insurers’ customers directly or indirectly and may be of a more universal nature, with their beneficiaries being other members of society (e.g. the purchase of a fire truck may bring a benefit to other insured in the future). A specified action financed from the prevention fund may cover only the customers of an insurer in question (e.g. subsidizing preventive examinations of its customers) provided that the basic principles are met and the participation in it does not depend on the conclusion of a contract with the insurer. Therefore, as long as the prevention fund is used in a manner serving directly the purpose of reducing the risk of occurrence of random events as well as their consequences, it ought to be assumed that the benefit obtained by a specified group of customers should not be qualified as a marketing activity.