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: This is the first in a series of articles about accounting for reinsurance under GAAP Targeted Improvements to the Accounting for Long-Duration Contracts (LDTI). It provides an introduction to the topic, giving an overview of what has and hasn't changed. Changes include a few that directly address reinsurance and others that indirectly result from changes to direct accounting and the existing ties between reinsurance and direct accounting.

Description: GAAP's elimination of gross profit as a basis for amortization of deferred acquisition costs enables the accounting for reinsurance of universal life contracts to better reflect the economic protection provided by reinsurance. It also makes it easier to assess the effectiveness of different techniques. Building on the analysis of an earlier article, "A Fresh Look at Accounting for Reinsurance of Universal Life," this article presents a practical approach to estimating the ineffectiveness of several existing techniques at accounting for the economic protection provided by reinsurance. The article ends with a summary of what a company might do to improve the effectiveness of its reinsurance accounting.

Description: Discussion of FAS 133 Implementation Issue B36 relating to the implications for the financial reporting of modco and similar reinsurance treaties where the assuming company assumes some investment risk from assets still owned by the ceding company.

Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.

Description: This presentation is an open forum, session 48OF, from the 2004 Spring Meeting of the Society of Actuaries, held June 14-15 in San Antonio, TX. The panelists focus on emerging U.S. GAAP accounting issues, and the implementation issues encountered by affected companies. The panelists discuss Statement of Position [SOP] 03-1 on nontraditional long-duration life insurance contracts, the SOP on internal replacements, and the impact of the Derivatives Implementation Group issue B36 on embedded derivatives for modified coinsurance and funds withheld reinsurance. Discussion from participants is included. From the Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 30, No. 2.

Description: This panel discussion, which occurred at the May 1982 Society of Actuaries meeting in Colorado Springs, presented a discussion on developments related to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles- GAAP. The discussion included: FASB reformulation of audit guide, treatment of single premium deferred annuities, problems of applying GAAP principles to Universal Life, and a discussion of papers titled: a. A Policy-Year Model for GAAP Valuation of Coinsurance and Modified Coinsuranee, by David N. Becker and Michael V. Eckman and, b. GAAP for Nonguaranteed Premium Life Insurance, by Kriss Cloninger III.

Description: 1993 SOA Annual Meeting, New York. This session discussion is about reinsurance accounting for life and health insurers. It covers both statutory developments and GAAP developments. Topics included: 1. NAIC model regulation and some of the specific state issues. 2. FAS 113, reinsurance accounting under GAAP accounting principles. 3. Fronting issues. 4. Disclosure reporting. 5. The role of reinsurance as one of several financial and capital management solutions available to insurance companies. 6. Business applications that flow out of the current accounting developments

Description: View the complete issue for the August 2014 Reinsurance News newsletter.

Description: This paper presents a policy-year model for GAAP valuation of reinsurance accepted on the coinsurance and modified coinsurance bases. Also presented are the interrelationships between the model's methodology and statutory accounting procedures, a discussion of experience-refunding situations, and a demonstration of the model's ability to yield GAAP profits as a level percentage of premium. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1981, Vol. 33.