Defense Base Act Center of Excellence

Administered by the US Department of Labor, Defense Base Act (DBA) insurance is a highly technical, federally mandated workers’ compensation program. It provides protection to employees of all nationalities — including subcontractor employees at any tier — working outside the continental US on a contract funded by any US government agency.

Marsh’s DBA Center of Excellence brings technical knowledge, broad experience, and negotiation prowess to securing appropriate DBA insurance coverage for government contractors.

Such expertise is of critical importance, as DBA jurisdiction is often misunderstood.

An employer’s failure to properly secure required DBA coverage can lead to fines, penalties, and non-covered claims. Corporate officers are jointly liable with the employer to provide DBA benefits; thus, the impact of one uninsured DBA claim can be severe. Moreover, improperly handled claims can impact DBA rates when insurance is sought, which can directly affect a contractor’s competitiveness in winning new business.

Dedicated expertise

Our Center of Excellence specialists understand the nuances of DBA regulations and are adept at helping you address your DBA needs, to the benefit of both your employees and your business.

Marsh is the only broker with a dedicated government contractor industry and DBA placement practice. Experience matters, so we’ve built a team that has hands-on knowledge of every aspect of the transaction — risk management, legal issues, claims filing and management, regulatory guidance, insurance advice and placement, and insurer negotiations. And the strength of our relationships with key DBA insurers allows us to negotiate competitively priced and enhanced program solutions.

We help you manage people risk holistically by analyzing your specific need for other coverages — including business travel accident, out of country medical, kidnap and ransom, and non-DBA foreign workers’ compensation — to help you ensure that your interests and your employees are protected overseas.

Data insights

By leveraging Marsh’s proprietary Blue[i] technology — which houses deidentified claim data spanning our large and diverse array of DBA clients — we are able to provide robust industry benchmarking data. With Blue[i], government contractors aren’t limited to the typical classifications utilized to create a peer group, such as North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code. Instead, we can create a true peer group with more granular profile data, such as job location, country of hire, type of work, and contract type. This produces predictive loss development factors, supporting competitive short- and long-term pricing options.

Loss control, safety, and claims management services

No single solution is an immediate panacea to the multitude of drivers affecting the cost of DBA insurance.

For that reason, our DBA Loss Process Re-engineering program takes an ongoing, three-part approach to the continuous improvement of DBA loss performance.

This program harnesses analytics to carve away at known cost drivers, while using objective data trending to help you identify and act on potential cost drivers of the future.

Pre-loss safety and loss control – Deploy measures that avoid losses from occurring.
Post-loss claims management – Create a plan that quickly responds to claimants following an injury to reduce severity.
Data and analytics – Deliver metrics to measure results, and identify new trends to establish mitigation solutions.

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Defense Base Act Center of Excellence

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