Description: Discussion of competing theories for valuing public pension liabilities. Emphasis on revised Actuarial Standards of Practice that focus on the purpose of the measurement.

Description: The SOA hosted the 2009 Public Pension Finance Symposium in Chicago, May 18–19 2009. Tom Lowman provides us with a short and insightful summary of each session from the symposium.

Description: Discusses the Survivor Benefit Plan SBP for the Uniformed Services from an actuarial perspective.

Description: Article Retirement To Chaos by Smith in The Actuary, March 1979, Volume 13, Number 3

Description: The article discusses the Texas Pension Review Board's Guidelines for Actuarial Soundness applicable to Texas state public retirement systems (including the system's amortization period), and how these guidelines are consistent with and complementary to both the current GASB 27 ARC disclosure, and the imminent GASB 67 & 68 disclosures. The GASB requirements will change from a de facto funding standard to strictly disclosure requirements, with a focus on plans whose funding trajectory is the poorest.

Description: Part 4 presents an alternate approach to obtaining the fair value of the public sector employer’s pension benefit liability.

Description: The Total Career Benchmark Model, consistent with Retirement 20/20 principles, focuses on reconstructing and maintaining a consistent and reasonable sharing of risks and rewards amongst the four stakeholders: Individuals, Society, Employers and the Markets. Modern technology provides the necessary tools. A series of benchmarks are used for tax limits, target pensions, accrual to date etc. The self adjusting, consistent benchmarks under the TCB Model, means that all stakeholders speak the same language. Individuals and Employers can easily compare what they have to what they need – and more importantly can see how to accrue what is needed. An individual’s ability to tax shelter income over a career is not dependent on the design of any employer pension plan. All funds allocated to an individual remain the individual’s and are not used to subsidize another person – except for the inherent risk sharing of an annuity – by hidden transfers of value.

Description: A comparison of recently used mortality assumptions among state-based and large-city public pension plans.

Description: This issue of The Retirement Forum presents the four prize-winning papers from the Retirement 20/20 Call for Models for Public Pension Plans Contest, which was conducted in 2018, and includes commentary from reviewers of these papers and replies from the authors.

Description: Abstract of paper that addresses the issue of the manner in which financial resources are measured within government budgets, how this measurement of resources might affect public budget decisions, and how the interaction of the budget with the actuarial model can lead public budge managers to engage in financially damaging transactions such as pension obligation bonds.