Captive insurance is an industry states compete for, and Oklahoma wrote a law to get its share. One company came. Universal Casualty Risk Retention Group, chartered in 2017 and owned by the transportation businesses it insures, is still Oklahoma’s only homegrown risk retention group. A state serious about that industry would help its first entrant write business. Instead the Oklahoma Insurance Department has spent three years trying to seize it over which accounting standard applies, a question Oklahoma’s own statutes answer two different ways. A judge has twice ruled against it.
Universal is paying its claims. Its fight with the state has never been about an unpaid claimant. It is about bookkeeping, and a state that won’t pick a lane. Oklahoma’s captive law says a captive reports under standard business accounting, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) unless the commissioner approves otherwise. The risk retention law points to a National Association of Insurance Commissioners manual that regulators read as requiring statutory accounting, SAP. Two statutes, two answers, one company caught between them. The Department chose the one that made Universal look weakest. In July 2025, after three days of testimony, Oklahoma County District Judge Richard Ogden ruled the Department “should not have required” SAP from 2017 through 2024.
On that reading the Department put Universal under supervision in October 2023 and suspended its license in March 2024. In May 2024 Universal sued the commissioner and Department officials in federal court. A month later the Department went to a judge without notice to the company and asked for a receiver. The court froze Universal’s business and handed its assets to an assistant receiver, who by Universal’s account held $8 million to $9 million for roughly 10 months. It lost about 92 percent of its member-owners.
Then the Department started losing. In January 2025 it sought emergency rehabilitation; after testimony, the judge refused. In May he dissolved the injunction, ordered the assets returned and removed the state-appointed supervisor, a defendant in Universal’s federal suit, for a conflict of interest and “questionable decision-making.” In October he denied reconsideration. The commissioner appealed.
What does a company get in Oklahoma for proving the state wrong? Within a week of the ruling, the Department pressed ahead with a five-year examination while Universal was still under supervision. Universal asked for the extension the statute allows; by its account, the answer came back in two days, with no analysis. A Department-hired hearing examiner then suspended the license again, not because Universal refused to produce records, which is what the statute requires, but because it produced them too slowly. In April, Judge Ogden vacated that order as “arbitrary and capricious.” There was “no refusal,” he found, only “attempts to comply” and “no showing of harm to the public.”
In August the Department’s lawyer came to defend that suspension, then moved to dismiss it as moot and stipulated the order stricken. Explaining why the examination had been cut short, he said: “We are going to eat face in front of F Committee with the NAIC. Our accreditation will be on the line.” F Committee accredits state insurance departments. Policyholders went unmentioned.
Is Universal solvent? In June a Department-hired examiner declared it insolvent in a report Universal is still answering. The only judge to examine the books said solvency was “unclear” and kept the company under supervision, where it remains, paying its claims. No court has found Universal insolvent.
The same Department is now a party, a witness and the referee-picker in the hearing on whether Oklahoma’s homeowners market is competitive. The attorney general and the Republican nominee for commissioner want Commissioner Glen Mulready and his examiner off the case and say they’ll go to the Supreme Court. It is the design Universal met.
Oklahomans elect a new commissioner Nov. 3. The winner and Legislature should pick a lane on accounting, put hearing officers outside the Department when it is a party, and give any insurer held under supervision past a deadline a public answer on whether it can pay.
Universal is the proof that Oklahoma’s captive law can work, and the only proof there is. It has spent three years and its own money beating the state that chartered it on receivership, rehabilitation, reconsideration and a second suspension. Making an example of a company that pays its claims, over an accounting question the state never settled, is not regulation. It is a sign at the border telling the next captive to keep driving.