Description: This open forum is from the 1991 Meeting of the Society of Actuaries, held June 3-5 in Colorado Springs. The panelists discuss actual experiences related to consulting on plan design issues, including the effect of regulatory restriction on plan design, such as the nondiscrimination rules, further application of cash balance plans, and other recent developments that affect plan design. Discussion from participants is included. From the Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 17, No. 3B.

Description: This article provides a basic introduction to the taxation of qualified annuities held in qualified retirement plans and IRAs. The article has been updated for the SECURE Act and the SECURE 2.0 Act. The article describes the basic types of employer-based plans, provides of overview of the taxation of contributions and benefits when annuities are held in connection with plans and IRAs, explains the required minimum distribution rules, and offers a brief introduction to recent legislation impacting qualified annuities.

Description: Current DC plans do an extremely poor job at managing investment and longevity risk for plan participants. This leads to suboptimal outcomes: retirement income is potentially too low, assets are subject to catastrophic losses and may even run out. Insurance solutions—most notably annuities—address some of these issues, but are expensive and not very much liked by consumers. This paper explores how Enhanced Risk Sharing Savings Accounts (“ERiSSA”), consisting of a combination of individual DC accounts with a collective risk sharing and return redistribution mechanism coupled with deferred annuities, might be able to strike a better overall balance for consumers.

Description: The article endorses broader use of lifetime income in DC plans. It explains why the use of DB plans will continue to decline. The article points out that plans sponsors will not willingly take on additional ERISA fiduciary exposure. The article endorses three regulatory reforms that would increase the use of lifetime income in DC plans. 1. A robust annuity issuer safe harbor that would free employers from fiduciary exposure for putting an annuity provider on the DC platform. 2. A requirement that a plan offer a lifetime income option to qualify for the 404(c) safe harbor. 3. A revision to 404(c) to allow plan sponsors to allocate part or all of the employer match to lifetime income.

Description: The survivor principle--that the share of each, at death, is enjoyed by the survivors--can be used to design tontine annuities and tontine pensions.

Description: This paper proposes a mandatory universal pension system MUPS which would be a system of fully portable IRA accounts piggy-backed on to existing Social Security withholding.

Description: This paper is a concept for U.S. pension reform.

Description: Diverse Risks 2016 Call for Essays

Description: This paper develops a set of retirement decision propositions, which hypothesize that the heuristic of Anchoring and the resulting cognitive biases described by Prospect Theory will influence the chosen retirement age. .

Description: This presentation was made at the 1975 Spring Cincinnati Joint Meeting of the Conference of Actuaries in Public Practice and Society of Actuaries. It addresses the following issues: Participation requirements, minimum vesting standards, joint and survivor annuity benefits, maximum limitations, special problems under offset plans, & impact on defined benefit vs. defined contribution plans. 1975 Record, Vol.1, No.3