My last post about filing claims talked about the process up
until submitting the final claim. Here is what needs to happen next! Once that
final red “submit claim” button is pushed you will receive an email stating
that the moving company has received it, this may take a few days. If you have
not received a response about your submitted claim call your moving company to
confirm whether or not they received it. The moving company will then make an
appointment with you to send someone out to look at and take pictures of all
the damaged items. For some reason they need their own photos even after you
spent all that time submitting them yourself
For our claims process, after the guy came to look at our
items I believe it took about 2 weeks to receive notice that the moving company
had given us an offer on our items. The offer can be seen on the DPS website
where you submitted the claim. On each item it will show how much you asked for
it and how much the moving company is willing to offer. Now it’s up to you to
decide if you think you got what you wanted. The next step is VERY important!
You have to accept EACH offer individually. So if you have 15 items you have to
click on all 15 items one at a time and click “accept offer.” If you don’t
accept the offer on one item you will not get the money for it. Lucky for us
the money we were offered was reasonable so I did not have to counter offer
anything so I don’t have much information on that. I do know that if you do
counter offer an item you’ll need to provide well written explanation as to why
you should get more money for that particular item.
The items that can be repaired will have an offer of a
repair price. This is their estimate on how much it would cost to fix/repair
your item. If you accept the offer it does not mean you have to repair it. We
had 2 chips in our living room TV stand but you can’t see it unless I point it
out. The TV stand was 100 dollars. They offered us 75 dollars to have it
repaired. It was not worth the haste of finding a repair person. So we accepted
the offer and ended up pocketing 75% of the original value. Now is the right
thing to do? Some would say no and that that money if given to you for a
repair. But honestly, that TV stand is going to go through another overseas
move and could get damaged again. So when looking at the amount you are offered
take into consideration how much you paid for it and what percentage they’re
actually offering you.
Now once you’ve accepted the offer on EACH ITEM you will
again get another response from the moving company. We got an email around 5
days after accepting our offer asking for our address. About 2 weeks later we
received a check in the mail. Our claims process if finally 100% over and I can
finally throw out our old broken couch that is hogging up the garage
space!
Here is a small recap of the process.
This is actually taken
directly from the claims page!
1)
You should notify the Transportation Service
Provider (TSP) [the Moving Company] of any loss or damage to your personal
property within 75 days of the delivery of your shipment.
2)
There are two ways to notify the Moving Company
of any loss or damage to your personal property, but only one way to file your
claim.
A. Loss and Damage Report. Using forms provided by
the Moving Company, you can notify them of your loss or damage at the time of
delivery and/or after the delivery. You can also file a loss/damage report in
the DPS claims module. NOTE: You do not have to file a loss/damage report as
long as you file your claim within 75 days of the delivery of your shipment.
Submitting a loss/damage report does not constitute filing a claim.
B. Filing your claim. You must file your claim in
the DPS claims module. TO prepare to file your claim, you will need to know
what items were lost or damaged to include the inventory number, year of purchase
and purchase cost. Pictures of damaged items can be uploaded into the DPS
claims module. Once your claim has been submitted, your Moving Company will
contact you with an email within 30 days to complete the claims process.
3)
Step by
Step instructions for both loss/damage report notification and how to file your
claim are located at www.move.mil
