Description: An observation is made regarding the impact interest rate scenarios have on VM-20 stochastic reserves.

Description: Results of an industry survey on life insurance companies' efforts to implement the recently adopted Life Risk-Based Capital Phase II Instructions, which include new requirements for variable annuity contracts. Adopted by the NAIC on October 14, 2005, the new requirements are effective for year-end 2005. Also discusses a summary of the requirements set forth in the instructions.

Description: This report, prepared by Advisory Subgroup I, was included as Appendix 3 of the 1987 Valuation Actuary Handbook. This advisory subgroup, or committee, was appointed by the New York Insurance Department and chaired by Donna Claire. This committee was charged with developing suggested regulations to deal with the concept of the Qualified Actuary and Actuarial Opinion and memorandum in accordance with New York’s recently amended reserve and nonforfeiture laws for guaranteed interest contracts and annuities with and without life contingencies. The actual regulation, New York Regulation 126, combines the work of the committee with Subgroup II, which focused on minimum reserve standards.

Description: The latest draft ORSA Guidance Manual was released on Oct. 14, 2011. An overview of the requirements from a qualitative, quantitative and governance perspective was provided in the December edition of the Financial Reporter. Several trade associations and com- panies commented on the draft.

Description: This article summarizes recent proposed changes to the Valuation Manual that might take effect for 2019 valuations for PBR business.

Description: This article gives the highlights of the 88-page report including detailed assumptions for products including universal life with secondary guarantees (ULSG), cash accumulation universal life (CashAccum), current assumption universal life (CAUL), indexed universal life (IUL) and variable universal life (VUL). The 29 companies and 83 products represented in the report allow for an interesting perspective on premium persistency assumptions used in pricing, cash flow testing (CFT) and generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)/international financial reporting standard (IFRS) functions. This article covers some general results and ULSG-specific results.

Description: This article views the principle-based methodologies from a future perspective and identifies some inconsistencies in the proposed approach, while presenting some simpler and more consistent alternatives.

Description: This paper shows the application of a threshold strategy on the surplus level of an insurance risk model results in a process that can be analyzed as a doubly infinite Markov chain with finite blocks. The resulting procedures are then used to calculate the probability distributions for time of ruin, the surplus immediately prior to ruin, and the deficit at ruin. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2008, Vol.1.

Description: Interest Maintenance Reserve ("IMR") has become a hot topic recently due to rising interest rates, causing decreases or even negative IMR balances for some insurers. This article aims to exam some new questions facing financial reporting actuaries: - How should negative IMR be treated for statutory reporting? - What are the other actuarial implications of negative IMR? - What have regulators done and/or plan to do about negative IMR? - What are potential mitigants?

Description: This is a summary of the NAIC meeting held in September of 2008.