TULSA, Okla. — A woman says she’s still fighting with her insurance company to get them to pay after a water leak ruined her east Tulsa home more than a year ago. I started looking into this after I received multiple complaints about the same company, State Farm Insurance.

Cassaundra Spears said she walked in the front door of the east Tulsa home to find a horrible mess. It was her mom’s home. She passed away in 2023.

“It broke my heart,” Spears said. “It was devastating. I lived here from the time I was six with my mom and my mother’s mother until she passed.”

After her mom died, Spears had taken over the mortgage payments. That included paying for homeowner’s insurance with State Farm. Her mom had the same State Farm Insurance policy since August of 1996.

Spears told me a tiny part in the dishwasher caused a huge problem.

“The intake valve on the dishwasher that connects the hot water line to the dishwasher had failed,” she said.

When her water bill hit for that period, it reported 5,000 gallons of water.

“The water shorted out all the relays for the furnace and the thermostat, causing it to continuously run,” Spears said. “So, when we found the house, it was over 95 degrees with a 92 percent humidity. Water was just rolling down the walls, and mold covered everything.”

“Everything was ruined and wet,” she said. “My mom took really good care of her house. So it was, it was heartbreaking.”

Spears called her insurance company, State Farm, and met the adjuster at the house.

“I had some concerns based on what the adjuster had said,” she said. “He had made some comments about not being sure that there would be coverage because the house was vacant, because my mom had passed.”

She said State Farm tried to deny the claim based on those reasons and gave her other ones too.

“’We’re denying it based off of the portion of policy related to earth movement,’ I’m like that doesn’t even apply here,” Spears said. “It was just one thing after another. And some of the things he was saying, I’m like, can you tell me where that’s at in the policy? ‘Oh, this is all coming from management. It’s all management.’ He would call and just berate me, and it would go absolutely nowhere. He’s like, ‘Well, this is my decision, and I know you don’t like it, but it’s nothing personal.’”

Spears said she asked for a different adjuster but didn’t get one.

“Because I’m just really uncomfortable with this adjuster,” she said. “I was told, ‘Absolutely, we don’t want that experience for you. We’ll take care of it.’ And come to find out, they just then reported that to that adjuster.”

Spears said it got to the point that no one at the insurance company would answer her questions on the phone.

“I was told by one of the representatives that there was a note that no one was allowed to speak to me, and they would hang up on me,” she said.

Spears said she could only send emails with questions that typically didn’t get answered.

“At this point I’m very frustrated, the house is just sitting here,” she said.

“They unnecessarily delay it,” Spears said. Finally, I had had enough.”

She filed a complaint with the Oklahoma Insurance Department.

I asked for all the complaints made about State Farm, but the Insurance Department told me those are kept private by law.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners website shows with red dots that State Farm typically has a high number of complaints in Oklahoma compared to other companies who sell homeowner’s insurance.

It also shows the number of complaints against State Farm has gone up each year since 2022.  Last year, 1,912 people complained to the Insurance Department.

“They actually really can’t do anything, I found out,” Spears said.

When you make a complaint, the Insurance Department serves as a go-between and communicates back and forth between the customer and the insurance company.

“The letter that I sent the insurance commissioner’s office, they would then forward to State Farm, and State Farm is obligated to give them a response,” Spears said.

I asked Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Glen Mulready about it.

“When you’re going back and forth between the consumer and the insurance company, what sort of authority do you have?” I asked.

“We can ensure that the insurance company is abiding by the contract and by the laws when they’re dealing with that policy and in a timely manner,” Mulready said.

“Are you allowed to tell the insurance company, ‘Hey, you need to fulfill this claim?’” I asked.

“100 percent yes,” Mulready said.

The commissioner said the state has made insurance companies pay consumers more than $11 million in 2023 and more than $13 million in 2024.

“We can tell an insurance company that, ‘Hey, this is what your contract says. You’re denying it for something that is outside of that contract, and so you are obligated, according to your contract, to pay that claim,’” Mulready said.

The Insurance Department can also fine insurance companies. It has fined State Farm five times since 2024 for a total of $4,000. They were all for the same thing: State Farm didn’t respond in time to customers.

“We can pretty much do everything from fines right up to pulling their license,” Mulready said. “If something were bad enough, we could pull their issue a cease and desist, and they can no longer do business in our state.”

“In six years, have you pulled an insurance company’s license?” I asked.

“We have, yes, but not for the reasons that we’re discussing,” Mulready said.

“If you were to find out that a company was routinely denying claims that they should be paying, bad faith, would that be a reason to pull an insurance company’s license?” I asked.

“If we saw repeated behavior of that and we had taken some sort of disciplinary action and that didn’t change it, absolutely,” Mulready said.

Spears wants the insurance commissioner to take a hard look at her complaint and the other 1,900 plus complaints filed last year against State Farm.

“At least I’m one person on top of what I presume to be multiple others,” Spears said.

The Better Business Bureau said they’ve received 4,914 complaints nationwide against State Farm the past three years.

Customers recently wrote things like:

“I am writing to formally express my concern and disagreement with the recent denial of our property claim,” and “I was told that my claim would not be processed,” and “The current amount of money that has been paid out to us will not be enough to cover the costs.”

Tulsa Attorney Christopher Camp said he’s been involved in bad faith litigation cases.

He said State Farm has a disproportionately high number of cases for denying claims.

Camp said since July 2022, just in Tulsa County, 98 lawsuits have been filed against State Farm in state and federal court.

In a case petition filed in 2024, it says, “State Farm employs its systematic and pervasive scheme throughout Oklahoma,” and that “State Farm wrongfully denies its insureds’ claims,” and “State Farm does so intentionally, knowingly, and purposefully for profit.”

Fifty-seven cases were settled by State Farm.

Ten of those cases were either sent to another court or dismissed without prejudice and could be refiled.  Two of those cases are currently stayed.

Twenty-nine of the cases are still open. They’re all “bad faith claims.”

“When you say bad faith, what do you mean?” I asked.

“An insurance company has an obligation to fully, fairly and promptly investigate all claims, and there’s several ways that they can fail to do that,” Camp said. “They can delay, unreasonably delay, the handling of a claim. They can deny claims that they know are valid.”

“What do you think is going on when it comes to insurance companies like State Farm?” I asked.

“Like any other business, they’re in it for profit,” Camp said.  “So, whenever they don’t pay out a claim, the profit goes up. They’re geared before they even step foot on the property, they already know that they’re going to find a way to deny the claim. This is to the benefit of their shareholders and to the insurance company. It’s to the detriment of the homeowners and those who have suffered loss and those who have who thought they were purchasing peace of mind when they bought insurance.”

Sources in the insurance industry told me off camera that State Farm has an unwritten policy to deny as many claims as possible. The company banks on the fact that you won’t sue. Camp agrees. He said it’s expensive and time-consuming to sue, so most people won’t.

“For every 10 valid claims that are denied, nine of the insureds are just going to say, ‘Okay, I guess we don’t have coverage,’” Camp said. “They’re not going to fight it. They’re not going to take it further.”

Spears said she thought about filing a lawsuit, but as of now, she has not.

“We had too much going on,” she said. “I didn’t want to deal with that on top of everything else.”

I wanted to ask State Farm about this. In an email, they said, “We don’t have a State Farm employee available for interview at this time.”

They also wrote, “Due to our company privacy policy, we cannot speak to the specifics of any individual customer claim. When it comes to claim-handling, State Farm seeks to provide our customers all benefits to which they are entitled within the terms of the insurance policy. We evaluate each claim individually based on the policy, the facts of the loss and the damages claimed.”

“There’s going to be other people that are going through this too,” Spears said.

“This isn’t right,” she said. “I don’t have any way to combat them. I’m not big enough.”

For months, Spears has been paying a mortgage on her home and her mom’s home too.

“Honestly, if this was my house, if I were living here, this was my personal residence, where would I go?” Spears said. “I don’t know, for over a year, I wouldn’t have anywhere to live.”

Spears said after she complained to the Insurance Department, she did get a new adjuster.

“That is when things started to get a little bit better,” she said. “But it was still slow going, pulling teeth.”

She said State Farm finally agreed to pay. However, the amount didn’t cover what it will take to fix the home back to the way it was before the water damage. Then, things got worse.

“They allowed us to get started, then they turned around a week and a half later and canceled the policy,” Spears said. “And with the house in the condition that it was, I couldn’t insure it. I couldn’t get insurance on it. It wasn’t inhabitable. So I had to allow the mortgage company to force place insurance at quadruple what it should have been and at an astronomical rate.”

Now, more than a year after the water damage, she’s still fighting to get State Farm to pay the full amount she said it will take to fix her home.

“It’s just still ongoing,” Spears said. “There’s probably a deficit of about $50,000 to $70,000 to finish the house from what State Farm’s approved that I’m continuing to have to fight with them for.”

“What do you think is going on?” I asked.

“I think he was looking for a way to deny the claim, and everything I’ve been told is that that’s what they do,” Spears said. “They’re not supposed to do that. But underneath everything, that’s what they do. They’re trying to find a way to deny your claim. I have talked to so many people that have had the same thing where they’re not getting coverage.”

Spears said many times she’s felt like giving up and just selling her mom’s house as is.

“What do you think she would think about all of this?” I asked.

“She believed in the right thing, almost to a fault,” Spears said. “She would have filed and been fighting on tooth and nail. She would have been devastated.”

Spears said she’s fought hard, just like she knows her mom would have.

“I’m going to keep trying until I just can’t anymore,” she said.

The Oklahoma Insurance Department handles about 15,000 complaints about insurance every year.

Commissioner Mulready said to keep in mind that insurance companies who insure more people will likely have more complaints.

According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, State Farm has the number one market share for homeowners’ insurance in the United States.