Description: This session at the 1998 Valuation Actuary Symposium looks at FAS 133, GAAP accounting for derivatives, including the impact on financial statements, implementation issues, and implications for the valuation actuary.

Description: This article highlights the fact that new requirements for disclosure of average liability duration and interest rates could lead to diversity in practice. It also recognizes that elements of the new disclosure requirements will enable financial statement users to perform their own crude estimates of these averages in ways that could help them to better understand the liabilities and to compare companies using consistent methods. Finally, the article describes how companies might also find value in such crude estimates.

Description: 1998 Valuation Actuary Symposium. In this open forum questions were fielded by the panel of experts. Some of the questions: 1. How do you pick spreads for use in your reinvestment strategy? 2. What's generally being done in terms of dynamically modeling policyholder lapsation? 3. How do companies treat riders and dump-in premiums and estimated gross profits for GAAP? 4. What impact does the current interest environment have on testing you are going to do this year? 5. Are there any suitable techniques for trying to aggregate the variable products with the fixed products?

Description: Panel session on the challenge that many insurers face as they try to grow their long-term-care insurance business, while simultaneously ensuring analysts and shareholders that earnings targets will be met.

Description: In 2018, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) adopted significant revisions to the U.S. GAAP insurance accounting literature, via Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2018-12. The title of ASU 2018-12 is “Targeted Improvements to the Accounting for Long-Duration Contracts,” and as a result a common acronym for ASU 2018-12 is LDTI (long-duration targeted improvements).

Description: Importance of non-GAAP operating earnings

Description: From a session at the 2000 Valuation Actuary Symposium held in Washington DC, September 14-15, 2000 Discussion of guaranteed minimum death benefits, guaranteed minimum income benefits, and guaranteed minimum accumulation benefits on variable deferred annuities, along with floor guarantees on variable immediate annuities. This session described the types of benefits found in the marketplace along with the associated risks. Current reserving practices, risk management techniques, and the latest American Academy of Actuaries AAA and National Association of Insurance Commissioners NAIC developments are discussed.

Description: As a follow-up to a previous five-part series on accounting for ceded reinsurance under LDTI, this article focuses on one issue that has, until now, been left without a general solution—how to measure the reinsured portion of a direct loss from capping a net premium ratio or flooring a liability. After acknowledging limited guidance on the issue, the article describes the various events that can lead to a loss, how reinsurance protects against loss, and how that is translated into formulas for measuring the reinsured portion of a loss.

Description: This paper considers the question of whether the growth in the size of financial statements witnessed over the last several years has yielded an increase in the quality of disclosure around issues of financial risk and to what extent this disclosure is satisfying the perceived needs of readers of the financial statements, as represented by the investment analyst community.

Description: This article discusses the adoption of the AICPA Statement of Position SOP 03-1 altering the way earnings emerge under FAS 97 and the impact of the enactment of SOX control requirements.