By Raymond Berry
This edition has a variety of articles and you should make the effort to read all of them. There are also links to more detailed articles if we have sparked your interest in a topic.
Please send us any articles that you feel may be of interest to others in the Pension Section. Just send us a link to the article and we will review the article and also contact the author regarding permission to re-print.
Until recently I thought CMS stood for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Not sure why the acronym is not CMMS.) But CMS also stands for Content Management System and the Society of Actuaries recently used this concept to organize the content of the material on the SOA website, soa.org. Actuaries actually reviewed the documents and assigned them to broad categories. The point is that this effort, along with other changes, greatly improved the search function and capabilities on the SOA website.
If you haven’t used the search feature on the website, spending a little time to familiarize yourself will be very worthwhile. There is an advanced search feature for searching phrases and also a “refine your search” feature which can quickly limit the number of documents you need to review to find the item you desire. See the website for details.
In other news, the American Academy of Actuaries recently released an issue brief titled “An Actuarial Perspective on the 2012 Social Security Trustees’ Report.” As a pension actuary I often get asked about Social Security. This brief will keep you current on the financial status issues.
Thanks to all the authors for their contributions to this issue.
Raymond Berry, ASA, EA, MAAA, MSPA, is consulting actuary at Alliance Pension Consultants in Deerfield, Ill. He can be reached at rberry@alliancepension.com.