Description: I.R.C. § 4371 imposes an excise tax on policies issued by foreign insurers or reinsurers covering U.S. risks. The application of the tax to funds withheld reinsurance can raise difficult questions. The IRS’s position is that an accrual concept applies, although that position is questionable. Taxpayers that instead determine the excise tax by looking only to actual payments made by the ceding company to the reinsurer or to the net amount of the ceded premiums after adjusting for the allowance paid by the reinsurer have a variety of arguments to support their position. The language of the premium excise tax, the regulations thereunder, the legislative history of the provision, and the very nature of an excise tax all support the position that the tax applies only when there is an actual payment. Other Code provisions that use similar language as well as the Supreme Court also support this view.

Description: This paper introduces the symbolic valuation, a stochastic valuation which allows flexible interest rate and cash flow assumptions, and provides an illustration which values a simple SPDA product. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1992, Vol. 1.

Description: This session at the SOA 1990 Dallas Regional Meeting looks at recent IRS rulings and regulations with respect to employee benefits.

Description: Panel discusses the selection of both economic and demographic assumptions in funding pension plans. They include the impact on selection of economic assumptions from the recently released Actuarial Standard of Practice [ASOP] No. 27, 'Selection of Economic Assumptions for Measuring Pension Obligations.' From the 1997 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 23, No. 3.

Description: This paper proposes a combinatoric approach to express higher moments of the quadratic variation process in terms of higher order variations of the original process and autocorrelations of the original process.

Description: Global financial crises like the one recently experienced, affected both large and small institutions.Today, when there is heightened need for enhanced risk management tools, some entities are unable to employ sophisticated mechanisms due to limited data availability. Moreover, from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s point of view via Basel II and Basel III, the internal ratings- based (IRB) approach requires that institutions have some reliable estimates of default probabilities of default for each rating grade. Taking the work of previous researches a step further, this paper intends to propose a new dynamic mechanism to for the risk management industry for to calculateing probabilities of default (PD). Through these estimates for the core model, we generate implied probability of default (PD) through actuarial estimation tools and different probability distributions. This mechanism is specialized to work best for low- defa ult portfolios (LDPs). Furthermore, scenario testing is adopted to validate the model against any model- specific bias

Description: Falling equity markets and interest rates have devastated pension plans worldwide during the past several years. The Standard & Poor’s 500 companies enjoyed a collective pension surplus of $252 billion in 1999. Even after the 2003 market rally, they face a deficit of $179 billion in 2003 Bianco 2003. These events have spotlighted the weakness of current funding and investment practices for corporate defined benefit pension plans. This article presents a case for securing all accrued benefits through “Full Funding.”