The assurance company needs to layoff workers, but wants to continue to provide high level service. It hires consultants to determine whom to lay off. The consultants say lay off adjusters who take the longest to complete their work on claims.

B is the answer because one can imagine a situation where the most complex claims will take longer than really simple claims. If your complex claims are being handled by your best people and they take longer, then the consultants suggestion will result in you laying off your best people. That's not ideal at all.

C doesn't really call into question the consultants recommendation does it? I mean, look, it says that claims will not be paid until the adjuster makes final determination. That seems to support the idea that hey, this company really needs to get rid of people who take too long on claims right?

Another way to think about it is that you have a group of people working on claims. They all having varying speeds of completing their work. Now a bunch of them are going to be laid off. That means that the remaining workers will have to pick up the work of the laid off workers. In this situation knowing that your remaining workers are going to have to take the work of the laid off workers, would you rather lay off the slow people or the fast people? Well, you'd lay off the slow people right because if you gave the slow people even more work, they'd take even longer to complete the claims whereas if you gave the fast people the slow people's work, they'd be better able to get the claims done quickly.

Thus, C supports the consultants conclusion and is the incorrect answer.

So here's what we're being asked for:



And this is the consultants’ criterion for selecting the staff to be laid off:



And as kumarashok29 mentioned, here's the company's goal, in the exact words of the passage:



Kumarashok29's answer is pretty thorough here -- but let's talk a little bit more about B.

Suppose that B is true, and "supervisors at Vasquez-Morrell tend to assign the most complex claims to the most capable adjusters." If so, then the company's best adjusters might also be among the slowest, since they're assigned the most complex claims. And "the most capable adjusters" are exactly the ones that you don't want to lay off. If the company lays off the best adjusters, it follows that their goal ("handle claims promptly") will be undermined.

I hope this helps!
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