Description: Enterprise risk management (ERM) needs to be seen in perspective of other management priorities and is not first in the hierarchy of corporate needs.

Description: Companies need to learn to plan for uncertainty by taking into consideration downturns, not just an environment of moderation and occasional booms.

Description: A followup on predictions about the future of enterprise risk management from 2003.

Description: This article explores the changing risk profile between the transitional Affordable Care Act (ACA) period (2014-2016) and under the final ACA period (beyond 2017) for the individual market. Actuaries are in a unique position to help facilitate the change from the current ACA period to the final period when health plans will have to take on substantially more risk.

Description: If your organization’s objectives involve taking on other people’s risks, you need some pretty complicated goals for your risk taking: diversification, risk selection, control cycle, consideration and provisioning.

Description: This session explores current practices and techniques that plan sponsors use to address the risks associated with the exercise of fiduciary responsibility. Attendees gain a better understanding of some of the issues that plan sponsors face and discuss the tools that can be used to monitor and manage exposure to risks and uncertainty. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 2: Spring Meeting, Vancouver, B.C., June 23–25, 2003, Session 108PD.

Description: This article examines the central formulas for Solvency II Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR) and core life authorized control level risk-based capital (ACL RBC) and looks at their underlying assumptions.

Description: This paper establishes a framework to analyze the volatility of corporate profits as a result of variability in accounting for pension plans. It models a Canadian corporation that maintains a defined-benefit pension plan and that has adequate cash flow to fully fund the pension plan, should it wish. Volatility of corporate profits is important because many senior executives have some component of their compensation directly related to corporate profitability and consequently do not want any surprises with respect to actual profits compared to expected profits. The volatility management techniques considered are investment policies for the pension plan, funding the pension plan, and an alternative plan design. The analysis is timely since changes are proposed to the accounting standards to eliminate most smoothing techniques. The results suggest that, depending on the investment environment, reduced volatility may be accompanied by by enhanced return, which is a result that few would expect.

Description: This paper discusses the level of reserve funds that a pension plan should maintain to protect itself from a downturn in the financial markets. From Current Pension Actuarial Practice in Light of Financial Economics Symposium, M-RS04-1.

Description: The study of Employee Benefits has always been aided by using financial algorithms. During recent semesters, the Lotus 1-2-3 package Lotus has been introduced to students due to the explosion of its use in the business community. This paper will show how our students use Lotus to design a spreadsheet for computing minimum annual distributions from tax-sheltered plans.