State Farm’s bid to raise rates in California following massive wildfire losses is under renewed scrutiny following the release of hidden camera footage targeting an executive at the company.

In a letter to California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog cited the leaked remarks to argue against State Farm’s recent request for an emergency 22% rate hike.

State Farm says the steep hike on homeowners is necessary to shore up its cash reserves in the event of another catastrophe. The insurer has said it expects to pay out about $7.6 billion in claims related to the Los Angeles wildfires, although reinsurance will lower its losses to about $612 million.

State Farm has also said it now has just above $1 billion in surplus cash, which it argues may not be enough to handle claims from another major catastrophe in California.

In the letter, Consumer Watchdog litigation director Will Pletcher said that State Farm’s recent arguments in favor of a rate hike appeared to contradict secretly recorded statements made by Haden Kirkpatrick, vice president of innovation and venture capital at State Farm.

Kirkpatrick, who has said he was secretly recorded while he believed he was on a Tinder date, was asked in the video whether the company “orchestrated” policy cancellations in relation to the California fires.

“It kind of is, but not in the way you would think,” he responded. “We’ll go to the Department of Insurance and say, ‘We’re overexposed here, you have to let us catch up our rating.’ … And they’ll say ‘eh’ because the Department of Insurance and the insurance commissioner is an elected position in California. He’ll say, ‘nah.’ And we’ll say, ‘OK, then we are going to cancel these policies.’”

Pletcher in his letter argued that those remarks “strongly suggest that policy cancellations are being wielded as a strategic bargaining tool rather than as a necessary response to financial risk.”

State Farm strongly denied that characterization in a statement to Realtor.com®, saying, “Any characterization of State Farm General’s communications in connection with our rate request as ‘manipulation’ of the rate process or of the public is false. 

“This person was never involved in or had any responsibility for business decisions relating to State Farm General or its California operations, including anything to do with our pending rate applications or the emergency interim rate request.”

State Farm had nearly a 20% share of the national homeowners insurance market in 2023, and insures about 1 million homeowners in California, where it also has some 1.8 million other policies in force.

The company came under scrutiny last year after it cancelled some 30,000 homeowner policies in California and stopped offering commercial apartment policies in the state altogether.

State Farm said at the time that the policy cancellations were the result of a financial analysis that considered factors including inflation, catastrophe exposure, reinsurance costs, and “the limitations of working within decades-old insurance regulations.”

The video recording of Kirkpatrick was published by O’Keefe Media Group, an activist group known for using false pretenses and hidden cameras to extract candid remarks from subjects.

Kirkpatrick did not respond to a request for comment from Realtor.com®. He previously told the Los Angeles Times that he was fired over his remarks in the video, which he believes was recorded in late January while he was on a date, which he now believes was a setup.

The video also contained remarks Kirkpatrick made disparaging homeowners in the Pacific Palisades, where he said that homes never should have been built because “it dries out as a tinderbox.” 

He said that the area was only developed because residents wanted to have “natural areas around them for their ego.”

Kirkpatrick also said in the recording that he had pushed to hire “more Hispanic and Latinos” to build “the perfect profile of the workforce of the future,” while saying the effort was “biased … away from my own kind.”

“These assertions are inaccurate and in no way represent the views of State Farm,” the company said in a statement. 

“They do not reflect our position regarding the victims of this tragedy, the commitment we have demonstrated to the people of California, or our hiring practices across the Company.”