Bottlenecks in underwriting don’t always surface as significant issues. In fact, most of the time, they start appearing as a few extra clicks, a missing document, or a task that sits in someone’s inbox for a few days. Over time, these minor delays add up and slow down the entire operation.

Performing a full underwriting audit is the most effective way to identify opportunities to improve your operations. The underwriting audit, or file audit, helps you understand what’s slowing your team down, what’s causing errors, and how to fix them. 

In this article, we’ll break down how to audit your underwriting process step-by-step, identify common bottlenecks, and implement practical fixes that actually work.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)

• Minor delays, such as missing files or manual data entry, often create significant underwriting bottlenecks over time.
• A full underwriting audit helps identify what’s slowing your team down and how to fix it.
• Carriers, MGAs, and brokers all benefit from audits to improve speed, accuracy, and compliance.
• Common bottlenecks include slow submission intake, uneven workloads, manual data entry, and outdated systems.
• Fix bottlenecks through standardization, workload balancing, system integration, and automation.
• Keep auditing regularly to monitor results, refine workflows, and prevent new bottlenecks.
• OIP Insurtech’s Underwriting Audit Service helps insurance teams identify inefficiencies and streamline operations with practical solutions.

What is an Underwriting Audit

An underwriting audit is a detailed review of underwriting files and decisions. Its primary purpose is to ensure that every policy is written accurately, priced correctly, and complies with all company and regulatory guidelines.

In the insurance world, auditors may not always feel like your best allies, but their role is vital. The auditor’s job is to review your work with precision, checking for inconsistencies, missing details, and anything that falls outside approved standards.

During an underwriting audit, the auditor carefully reviews your files to confirm compliance and verify that pricing aligns with company rules. Documentation plays a significant role here, too, as every file must be organized, complete, and easy to access.

The insurance industry deals with sensitive data and complex details; therefore, audits are there to find your mistakes, but also to help you fix them.

Types of Underwriting Audits

Underwriting audits are divided into three categories:

1. Financial Audits focus on checking the financial accuracy of underwriting operations and records. They typically involve confirming that premium calculations are correct and verifying the accuracy of related financial statements.
2. Process or Operational Audits evaluate how efficient and effective the entire underwriting process is, helping identify opportunities to improve performance, reduce costs, and boost productivity.
3. Compliance Audits ensure that the underwriting process and all related decisions fully comply with applicable laws, regulations, and internal company policies.

In this article, we will focus on discussing the bottlenecks of the underwriting process audit, or the underwriting operational audit. If you’d like to know more about underwriting audits in general, read our article Everything You Need To Know About Insurance Underwriting Audits.

Who Needs an Underwriting Process Audit

Insurance carriers, MGAs, and brokers can all benefit from an underwriting audit. When the underwriting process works smoothly, underwriters can focus on risk assessment and decision-making. 

If you have just a few bottlenecks in your operations, your team will slow down and spend most of their day searching for files, waiting for approvals, or re-entering data. 

The underwriting process audit helps you see what’s really going on inside that process. A proper audit shows how work moves from submission to decision. It exposes hidden inefficiencies, such as repetitive data entry, manual reviews, and unclear workflows. 

The audit also measures the effectiveness of your current tools and systems. More importantly, it gives you a baseline for improvement and real data you can act on, rather than guesses or assumptions.

By regularly auditing your underwriting workflow, you can reduce turnaround times, improve accuracy, and lower operational risk. You’ll also strengthen compliance, since most audits uncover missing documentation or incomplete file notes that could cause problems later.

Map Out Your Underwriting Process

Before you start fixing anything, you need to see what’s working well and what’s not. Start by mapping every step of your underwriting workflow from start to finish. Identify where the process begins (for example, when a broker submits an application) and where it ends (when a policy is issued or declined).

Once you’ve defined the start and end points, break the process into smaller steps. Include every key stage, including submission intake, triage, data collection, risk assessment, pricing, decision, and documentation. Don’t forget to mark where hand-offs happen. Every time a file moves between people, systems, or departments, there’s a risk of delay.

The next step is to collect data on how long each step takes as precisely as possible. These numbers help you pinpoint where work slows down. You can track them manually at first or use workflow analytics if your systems allow it. When you finish mapping, you’ll have a clear visual of your underwriting process.

Identify the Bottlenecks in Your Underwriting

After mapping out your whole underwriting process, it’s time to spot where things get stuck. Bottlenecks are the steps that consistently slow down the workflow. They might be easy to spot, like a submission queue that never empties, or more subtle, like inconsistent risk reviews that require extra clarification.

One of the most common bottlenecks is at submission intake. If new applications sit in a shared inbox waiting for someone to assign them, you’re losing valuable time every day. Another common bottleneck is workload imbalance: some underwriters are overloaded, while others have capacity.

Manual data entry is another classic source of slowdown. If your team needs to re-enter the exact client details into multiple systems, you’re both wasting time and increasing the chance of errors. 

Fragmented systems also make it hard to track progress. If underwriters have to jump between platforms to gather information, it disrupts focus and slows decisions.

Finally, outdated systems are one of the biggest hidden bottlenecks. Legacy software that can’t integrate with modern tools forces your team to resort to manual workarounds. If you notice underwriters spending more time on admin tasks than on underwriting itself, your system is part of the problem.

If you’d like to know more about how legacy systems are slowing your operations, click here to read our article 7 Hidden Risks of Legacy Systems in Specialty Underwriting.

Analyze Key Data Points

Once you’ve identified where the flow slows, you need metrics that show the scale of the issue. Start by tracking turnaround times at each stage of underwriting. Measure how long it takes from submission to decision, and from decision to policy issuance.

Referral and approval rates are another key metric. If too many submissions are being routed for manual review, it could mean your rules are unclear or that your automation isn’t correctly calibrated. If you constantly have a backlog of inspection reports, you’re doing something wrong.

Try to evaluate documentation quality, such as incomplete or missing files, or how easy or hard it is to access the document when needed. Finally, monitor error rates, for example, incorrect classifications or missed risk factors. These may not be obvious bottlenecks, but they’re signs of poor process control.

By consistently collecting this data, you’ll see patterns. Certain products or teams always have longer cycle times. Delays only happen when referrals increase. These insights help you focus your fixes where they’ll have the biggest impact.

Find the Root Cause

When the underwriting audit determines the bottlenecks, it’s better to fix them smarter than faster. You need to understand what’s really causing it. Try to identify the real root cause and work on solving it.

For example, submissions are waiting too long in the intake queue because they aren’t automatically assigned. The real problem isn’t the submissions and the queue, but the assigning process.

When you examine the whole process, you’ll often find that the cause isn’t an individual mistake. Root-cause analysis keeps you from wasting time on short-term solutions and helps ensure improvements actually last.

Fix the Bottlenecks

Now that you know what’s wrong and why, you can start improving your process. Start with the fixes that will deliver the most significant return on effort.

Standardizing submission intake is one of the easiest wins. Define clear routing rules based on product, region, or risk level. Use automation to assign new cases to the correct underwriter, rather than relying on manual triage.

Next, balance your team’s workloads. Use dashboards that show who has capacity and who’s overloaded. Setting service-level targets for each stage keeps everyone accountable.

To eliminate data re-entry, integrate your systems or centralize your data. A single source of truth helps underwriters work faster and reduces mistakes. If renewals are slowing things down, try merging your new business and renewal workflows.

Finally, consider where automation and AI can help. Automated document intake, data extraction, and risk scoring can drastically cut cycle times. For repetitive admin work, explore outsourcing or shared service models.

If you’re interested in automaton but don’t know where to start, Bound AI offers a free demo to introduce you to underwriting automation.

Monitor the Results

Auditing your underwriting process isn’t a one-time project. It’s an ongoing cycle of review and improvement. Once you’ve made changes, monitor how they perform. Use dashboards to track turnaround times, queue sizes, and workload balance in real time.

Set a regular audit schedule; quarterly or twice a year usually works for most teams. In each audit, look for signs that old bottlenecks are returning or new ones are forming. Over time, your team will get better at spotting and solving them before they grow.

Collect feedback from underwriters, brokers, and even clients. Their experiences often reveal issues that metrics alone can’t. If a broker says they never know the status of a submission, that’s a visibility problem worth solving.

Underwriting Process Audit by OIP Insurtech

At OIP Insurtech, we help insurance teams simplify and strengthen their underwriting operations through our Underwriting Audit Service. Our experts review your workflows, identify inefficiencies, and provide clear, actionable insights that improve accuracy, compliance, and turnaround time. 

Whether you’re looking to streamline manual tasks, modernize legacy systems, or ensure consistent underwriting standards, we give you the tools and support to build a faster, more innovative, and more reliable underwriting process.

Ready to make the first step to optimize your underwriting? Click here to contact us and get started..

The Bottom Line

Auditing your underwriting process helps you eliminate tasks that don’t add value. When you identify and fix bottlenecks, you free your underwriters to focus on what matters most. With clear workflows, consistent data, and intelligent automation, your underwriting process becomes a competitive advantage instead of a burden. 

The key is to treat auditing as an ongoing practice and perform audits regularly. Every audit brings new insights, and every fix brings you closer to a streamlined, efficient, and scalable underwriting operation.

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