Description: The author has gathered a variety of resources, general theories, and specific practices concerning spreadsheet errors and their avoidance.

Description: U.K. life insurers writing participating business have, since the end of 2004, been required by their regulator, the Financial Services Authority FSA, to value their assets and liabilities on a market-consistent basis. The purpose of this paper is to explain the new valuation approach based on market-consistent values and its rationale set out the issues faced by life insurers in implementing the new regime and explain how these issues have been addressed by insurers.

Description: In 2007 the International Accounting Standards Board IASB released a discussion paper proposing a new accounting model for insurance contracts, known as the current exit value model. One aspect of the proposed accounting model is that claim liabilities would need to include explicit margins satisfying certain criteria. Currently it is common for U.S. medical insurers to include explicit margins in their claim liabilities. However, we demonstrate that the margin approach most commonly used today by U.S. medical insurers does not satisfy the objectives articulated in the IASB discussion paper regarding the role of margins. We then propose a new formula for including explicit margins in U.S. medical insurance claim liabilities in a manner that is more compatible with the principles articulated in the IASB discussion paper. Finally, we illustrate our proposed claim liability formula using an example drawn from real-life data.

Description: This report summarizes the results of a research project undertaken by the Society of Actuaries to study the possible effects of the International Accounting Standards Board’s IASB Discussion Paper describing its Preliminary Views on Insurance Contracts on nine representative U.S. life, health and annuity products.

Description: This is the version of the SOA’s research report that appeared in the July 2008 issue of the Actuarial Practice Forum. This report presents modeling results of the possible impact of the IASB’s preliminary views of accounting for insurance contract liabilities on certain U.S. Life, health and annuity insurance products. This report presents comparisons of selected U.S. GAAP values to corresponding values of the proposed International Financial Reporting Standard IFRS results.

Description: This paper is Part 1 of a two-part submission. Part 2, “An Alternative Approach to Capital Allocation,” discusses using risk-replicating techniques that directly calculate the cost of capital. Such techniques can be used as a substitute for capital allocation. This paper expands upon current capital analysis by introducing a practical approach that considers the objectives of all stakeholders of an insurance company in setting appropriate capital targets.

Description: This paper expands upon current capital analysis by introducing a practical approach that considers the objectives of all stakeholders of an insurance company in setting appropriate capital targets. In addition, the paper introduces a technique for estimating capital adequacy that is based on mapping stochastic distributions of regulatory and rating agency capital measures to observable financial rating transition matrices.

Description: This paper considers the question of whether the growth in the size of financial statements witnessed over the last several years has yielded an increase in the quality of disclosure around issues of financial risk and to what extent this disclosure is satisfying the perceived needs of readers of the financial statements, as represented by the investment analyst community.

Description: This paper examines how incentives created by management structures and performance measurement systems affect a corporation’s risk management decisions.

Description: The purpose of this discussion is to introduce a few additional points and discuss how different assumptions will alter the results in some cases.

Description: This paper describes the use of the Moses software package to model variable annuities with multiple guarantees. Pricing and risk management are discussed.