An Oklahoma organization that takes money up front for cemetery merchandise — markers, monuments, vaults, memorials — normally has to hold that money in trust. 36 O.S. § 7127 lets you file a surety bond with the Insurance Commissioner instead, in an amount not less than the minimum funding requirement. Premiums cost 1% of the bond amount, $100 minimum. The application collects no credit information, and most applications approve instantly.
















No underwriting round-trip for the standard cemetery merchandise security — enter your amount, pay, and file with the Insurance Department. Here is the whole thing:
Your entity type, business details, the bond amount your annual computation produced, and an effective date. That is the entire application.
Your exact price appears before you pay, and the bond issues the moment you do. The application collects no credit information, and most applications approve instantly.
Submit the executed bond with your permit application, your renewal, or the annual report due March 15. The Commissioner must approve the bond. Wet-ink original mailed on request.
A family buys a marker or a vault years before anyone needs it, and hands over the money now. Oklahoma treats that money as still belonging to the buyer until the merchandise is delivered, so an organization selling prepaid cemetery merchandise must hold funds in trust equal to 110% of the wholesale cost of everything covered by outstanding contracts, computed each year as of December 31. Wholesale cost is measured on the vendor's standard published quotations and price lists, not on what you charged.
The bond is the alternative to writing that cash into a trust account. It runs payable to the State of Oklahoma for the benefit of the Insurance Commissioner and all purchasers of prepaid cemetery merchandise, must be approved by the Commissioner, and cannot be written for less than the minimum funding requirement. If the organization fails to deliver what buyers paid for, the buyers — not just the regulator — are the protected parties.
Two details worth knowing. The surety must give 30 days' notice before cancelling or terminating, and remains liable for obligations that arose during the bond term even after it expires or is cancelled — so a lapse does not erase last year's contracts. And the industry did not always sit here: effective July 1, 2010, the governing section was recodified out of Title 8 into 36 O.S. § 7124, moving oversight from the Banking Commissioner to the Insurance Commissioner, who then wrote the current rules. It is not insurance for you: if the surety pays a claim, you reimburse the surety.
These are the actual issuing fields — no credit section, because this application does not collect credit information.
Start the application →Enter the amount your December 31 computation produced, see the exact price, and file the executed bond with the Insurance Commissioner. Free until issued.