What do you do after a long day at work when you come home, kiss your spouse and start rifling through the mail. Boom a letter from your favorite government organization the Motor Vehicle Administration. Don’t be fooled this is not a love letter you open it up and the first thing that your eyes see are the dreaded words we regretfully inform you that your car insurance has lapsed. You also see that the only thing standing between you and thousands of dollars in fines are an Fr-19. You start to think what is an Fr-19 and why do I need one? You start to think about your long illustrious driving history where you never so much as received a parking ticket and wonder why you are being targeted by the MVA? You also recall that you’ve never gone even a day without car insurance. You call out to your spouse to see if they somehow dropped the ball and you remember 5 months ago buying a brand new car and making sure that you contacted www.RIghtawayInsurance.com before pulling off of the lot to add the vehicle. They were able to save you hundreds of dollars a year over your previous car insurance and you switched without having any lapses.
Now you are thinking to yourself, “I had car insurance the whole time, so why did they send me this request for proof?”
This is a great question and there could be several reasons for getting the request from the Maryland MVA.
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Luck of the Draw – Each year, the MVA will randomly send out requests to a selection of tagged vehicle owners and you just can be one of the ones to get the letter.
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You switched insurance companies – If you change insurance companies (even if you stay with the same insurance agent), you could get an FR19 request. This happens because you are in essence canceling the auto insurance with your former company to move to the new company. When an auto policy cancels, the insurance company is required to report to the MVA that the policy has cancelled. They usually do this on a weekly basis. So if the MVA receives this notice and generates the FR19 before they get notice from the new company that the insurance is in place, you will get the letter.
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Your policy cancelled and later reinstated without a lapse – Just like above, the company is required to notify the MVA of the cancellation and the FR19 can be generated before the MVA is notified that the policy has been reinstated.
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You changed vehicles on your auto insurance policy – If you replace vehicles, there is a chance that you could get an FR19 request for either the old vehicle, or the new vehicle. The odds increase if you are keeping the same tags of the new vehicle that you had on the old one. This is again because the insurance company has to report that the insurance on the old vehicle was cancelled.
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You may also have sold a vehicle and not wanting to keep paying car insurance on a vehicle you didn’t have anymore called your favorite agent at https:///www.RIghtawayInsurance.com to remove the vehicle from the policy but wait have you turned in your rags before doing this? Not waiting until turning your tags in to drop insurance from a vehicle could create that dreaded insurance lapse and cause the need for an Fr-19
