The owner of a motorized scooter and the person who moved it challenged ICBC's assessment of responsibility for damage to a parked car. Ryan Orr admitted that the scooter touched a neighbour's vehicle while he was moving it backwards by hand, but he and Talia Bernath disputed that the contact caused a dent. They wanted a refund of $728.10 that ICBC had collected when Orr renewed insurance on another vehicle.
The Civil Resolution Tribunal treated the dispute as a small claim arising from ICBC's obligation to assign accident responsibility correctly. That didn't place the burden of proof on the insurer at the hearing. The applicants had to establish, on a balance of probabilities, that ICBC breached its statutory or contractual obligations.
Contemporaneous statements mattered. Orr described noticing a dent a few days after the incident and speaking to the vehicle owner. Bernath's earlier account included his immediate concern that the scooter might have caused the damage. Those accounts were difficult to reconcile with their later position that no damage was caused. The Tribunal also examined photographs and an ICBC estimator's description of the heights of the scooter's luggage rack and the car's dent.
The estimator wasn't neutral because they worked for ICBC, so the Tribunal expressly declined to receive the opinion as independent expert evidence. It nevertheless accepted the report as a business record forming part of the investigation. The applicants had no neutral expert evidence displacing that account. Their photograph of a tape measure omitted the end of the tape and didn't establish a different contact height. The Tribunal also rejected the suggestion that ICBC was required to take physical measurements in every minor collision, and found that the applicants had received adequate notice to gather evidence.
ICBC had correctly attributed 100% responsibility to Orr, and the refund claim was dismissed. The decision didn't turn on a separate licensing concern raised in correspondence. For insurers and people contesting fault determinations, the distinction between an employee's investigative business record and independent expert opinion is useful, but so is the value of early witness accounts that can be tested against later explanations.