Description: Summary of recent activity in the social insurance and public finance section and invitation to volunteers.

Description: State and local pension plans provide their stakeholders with a great deal of information. However, that information is typically not presented in a user-friendly way. Summary documents often fail to give their readers a clear and comprehensive picture of a plan's finances. The premise of the SOA Project described in this article is that there is a need for concise summary reviews of a plan's operations. The Project's mandate included the preparation of two sample reviews of two different state systems that might serve as models, but not rigid templates for reviews prepared by plan management. This article describes and compares the two reviews and their accompanying dashboards, and also addresses the Project's broader goals. The article emphasizes that it is not the exact shape or format of a summary review that matters, but how effectively it conveys the current state and prospects of a plan's finances.