Description: This article addresses the concern that while risk assessment models are supposed to help identify and reduce risk, they can be a source of risk themselves. A new report released by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries in August 2008 helps address that potential problem by providing useful guidance to actuaries who are charged with designing, implementing and using advanced models.

Description: Actuarial models have always been an important tool for helping companies project future results and understand risks. As complex models have started to become critical components of the reporting and compliance processes, however, models have vaulted to new levels of importance—and of scrutiny. This has raised everyone’s interest in the management of models, and by implication, in their ability to control the inherent model risk. From Small Talk Newsletter, Issue 37, January 2012.