Insurance broker seemingly messed up my auto payment authorization, so I didn't pay for my insurance for over 2 years. Now I am being billed by the insurance company for the missed payments.

Location: TN, USA

My apologies if this is not the right subreddit for this.

Back in January, I met with a new insurance broker to help me see if I could get better insurance policies for my home and auto insurance. They did, so I switched to the new policies and informed my old insurance broker of the change and get the old auto policy canceled (home and auto were under separate insurance companies, so this is just for the auto policy). I eventually get a letter in the mail about my previous auto policy informing me that my remaining balance will be refunded. Problem is, I don't recognize the last 4 digits of the bank account that the letter states that the funds were refunded to.

My wife and I look over our financial statements and discover that we had never made a payment to the insurance company in the over 2 years that we had our previous auto policy. I tried to contact the insurance company, but they said that I have to go through the broker. I email the broker and explain the situation and they create a case with the insurance company. In the meantime, they located the EFT form for the auto pay that I submitted, with my name, address, signature, and date signed.

After a while, the broker gets back with me informing me that the insurance company sent them an EFT form. This form, while it does have my name and address, it does not have my bank account info nor my signature and date, and instead shows that mystery bank account that I saw on the refund letter.

I ask them to look into it further on their end, because at this point I'm pretty confident that it was an error by the insurance broker. About a week later, they get back with me again and inform me that they "discovered the system error that caused this issue" and that they are working with the insurance company to refund the premiums that were incorrectly charged. They also told me that the insurance company will be invoicing me for the balance, however I have not yet heard from them so I do not know the details.

I tried to clarify exactly what the error was and who made it (the broker or the insurance company), but the agent told me that they "were not told that information".

So, am I legally responsible for paying back the insurance premium payments? I am not sure how I will be able to pay it back if charged the whole thing up front since it will likely be thousands of dollars. I also hardly think it's fair that I should be on the hook for an error that I did not cause. I understand that I should have noticed that the payments weren't being taken out all this time and that, since it was my policy, I am responsible for paying it, but I did everything correctly when I enrolled, so I never thought to check to make sure I was being charged correctly.

Would the insurance broker be liable for the charges if the mistake was found to be on their end? The vague wording in the email and the two EFT forms makes me believe that it was their mistake, but I don't believe that they would tell me if that were the case, hence the vague wording in their email explaining it.

Thank you.