Two former investigators just hauled Farm Bureau Property & Casualty Insurance Co. and several affiliates into federal court, accusing the group of racketeering, concealment and firing them after they refused to stay quiet.
The case paints a long, messy story that winds through multiple states and years of internal clashes.
James Newton and Brent Meskimen, once police officers and later part of Farm Bureau’s Special Investigation Unit, filed the suit against Farm Bureau P&C, FBL Financial Group, Farm Bureau Financial Services and the West Des Moines firm Wickham & Geadelmann.
They also named several executives and lawyers. According to our data, the accusations line up with repeated patterns the whistleblowers flagged.
The filing claims senior officials buried evidence of fraudulent acts by company agents or employees and kept regulators in Iowa and other states out of the loop.
The lawsuit says company leaders ran a scheme to mislead policyholders and regulators, along with anyone in the insurance ecosystem who follows mandatory reporting rules.
Iowa law blocks employers from firing workers who refuse to participate in illegal conduct. Newton and Meskimen say Farm Bureau crossed that line.
As of now, none of the defendants have responded in court, and outreach to Farm Bureau and the law firm didn’t go anywhere.
The suit stretches back to 2011, but a 2023 Nebraska house fire pushed everything past the point of no return. A policyholder filed a claim after the blaze, and the SIU discovered that an adjuster had slipped into the policyholder’s garage using a credit card to pop the lock.
The goal, the lawsuit says, was to check whether certain items listed as fire losses were actually there. Weird move, and not one the investigators felt they could walk past.
Newton and Meskimen met with general counsel Wickham and said the policyholder deserved to know about the illegal entry.
Assistant general counsel Karl Olson eventually allowed them to disclose the adjuster’s break in but blocked any mention that two vendors hired by Farm Bureau had also been inside. That selective transparency rubbed both investigators the wrong way.
Then the paper trail got even stranger. Olson and Claims VP Anthony Kimmi allegedly ordered all material tied to the break in – photos, notes, the whole bucket – into a separate file connected to a canceled Minnesota policy with no link to the Nebraska fire.
After that, staff locked down access to the file and disabled print functions. Honestly, it sounded like someone trying to bury the evidence under a random folder.
By June 9, 2023, Newton and Meskimen sat down with Wickham again at the West Des Moines home office and said they couldn’t stay attached to the file.
They told him the setup clashed with state law, professional standards, Farm Bureau’s own stated values and maybe even criminal statutes. Wickham promised to talk to leadership. Meskimen pushed back, saying the order came from Olson in the first place.
Once the SIU labeled the conduct as fraud by the company, they passed the findings to Paul Swinton, a VP and assistant general counsel at FBL Financial Group.
The lawsuit claims Swinton refused to forward most of those findings to Iowa and Nebraska regulators, despite mandatory reporting rules that don’t leave much wiggle room. Maybe he thought it would blow over.
The suit says this wasn’t a one off. Newton and Meskimen were allegedly told not to refer cases to regulators in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, Arizona or New Mexico, even when the rules required it.
That left regulators in the dark, and the investigators say they paid the price for trying to follow the law.
No neat ending yet. The defendants haven’t filed responses, and the accusations hang there, sharp and unresolved.
