The Foreign Service Journal, April 2005

claim because most of my loss was caused by the sea, and damage from falling into water happened to be something covered by my USAA renter’s insurance. The lessons I learned from this experience were hard ones. Some of them are quite familiar — the sort of thing you’re told in annual messages from the logistics office — while others were much less obvious, and much more costly. Here are some points, both obvious and obscure, that other people who suffer large losses might find useful: Inventory, Inventory, Inven- tory. I had the good fortune to have a very thorough inventory, which I learned to do after suffering a small loss of air freight early in my Foreign Service career. What I had not inventoried was my books. That lit- tle omission alone probably cost me a couple of thousand dollars. Not having a good inventory at all would have cost me tens of thousands. Know Your Insurance. The department is absolutely right when it tells us to have our own insurance to cover our shipments, but people should look very, very closely at what their insurance actually covers. I relied blindly on my USAA renter’s insurance, which by chance covered a good portion of my loss. What I wasn’t aware of were the many pro- visions for depreciation and other reductions built into the insurance for claims over $2,500. Even though I thought I had “replacement insur- ance,” it turned out to be worth a good deal less than that. All told, the limitations built into the policy ended up costing me over $8,000. So don’t expect your insurance to cover a large loss without conditions; read the policy closely before pur- chasing it. Give the Claims Office a Pass. With the benefit of hindsight, I would have been better off not to have filed with the department’s Claims Office at all. If I hadn’t, I could have used the guidelines favored by USAA, which ask for the current replacement value of the lost items rather than the obscure “value at acquisition” required on the department’s DS-1620 claim form. Beware the DS-1620. At cur- rent replacement value, my original claim amount would have been sig- nificantly higher, as would USAA’s corresponding payment for my loss. A replacement-value claim might also have put me in the position of being able to write part of the unin- sured amount off my federal income tax as a catastrophic loss — an option foreclosed by the smaller size of the claim I filed with the department. What did I get from pursuing the Claims Office route? Ridiculously slow processing, an insultingly small payout, and a much larger financial loss than I would otherwise have suf- fered. The bottom line is that the Claims Act, under which the depart- ment pays employees for such loss- es, is designed to minimize the gov- ernment’s liability. So if you look for reimbursement under the Claims Act, you may just minimize your recovery further. Kiss Your Shipment Goodbye. Don’t assume that the department knows or cares where your HHE is. The logistics experts in Washington and Europe were completely igno- rant of the existence of my ship- ment, and were of no assistance at all when I wanted to get more informa- tion about its condition. Unfortun- ately, I believed the self-congratula- tory propaganda the logistics office has put out in recent years about the service it provides in tracking ship- ments abroad. It turns out that A/LM and the regional logistics offices make no effort at all to track “post-to-post” shipments like mine. Who does track HHE? Accord- ing to the Bureau of Administration, it’s up to the GSO at your post. But, in the department’s view, woe betide those who choose to send their belongings to difficult places. As a senior officer in A/LM told me: “It is an unfortunate fact that the depart- ment must rely on the mechanisms of international ocean freight that have developed for the movement of commercial goods in large quantities and often prove ill-suited to the shipment of personal effects. Such shipments are even more problem- atic in less developed parts of the world such as West Africa, where the relative paucity of carriers can often result in unusual routings and trans- shipment points such as you have noted.” And even more problemat- ic, he might have added, when an embassy uses the services of the low- est bidder on the moving contract. If It Matters, Leave It at Home. Which brings me to my final lesson, perhaps the hardest of all. They told us in A-100 that we should leave items of great personal or sentimental value at home when we transfer abroad. I think, though, that most of us tend to rationalize the risk over time, deciding that, on balance, it is preferable to keep those items with us overseas rather than to leave them locked in storage 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 5 F S K N O W - H O W Don’t assume that the department knows or cares where your shipment is.