A provision or reserve to cover the estimated expenses of settling all claims, reported and unreported, outstanding at the accounting date; often known as Unallocated Loss Adjustment Expenses (ULAE). It excludes external expenses and those which can be directly attributed to the settlement of individual known expenses (such as legal expenses and claims assessors’ fees) as these are commonly identified in statistics as a form of claim payment and thus provided for within the provision or reserve for outstanding claims, known as Allocated Loss Adjustment Expenses (ALAE). It usually includes expenses that are not directly attributable to specific claims department staff and premises cost allocations.