Description: This article discusses funding flat-benefit pensions and suggests steps to address what will likely be a future underfunded plan.

Description: Review of Fifty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Actuaries of the Civil Service Retirement System. The authors found it to be a concise well written report discussing a number of issues facing all pensions in an inflationary economy. Both the title and the dull format in the usual Government Printing Office style would seem to insure this document's instantaneous consignment to dead storage. However, behind the cover of this small pamphlet is a concise, well written report discussing-a-number of the issues facing not only federal pension programs at the present time, but all pensions in an inflationary economy. For example, several of the 11 pages devoted to the main report discuss the implications of static assumptions ignoring inflation as opposed to dynamic assumptions including inflation.

Description: Description of program parameters for next year.

Description: Acquiring a U.S. Operation—A Primer by Valerie Lopez-Zinzer from International Section News, October 2004

Description: Eric Friedman’s comments on ‘The Case for Stochastic Present Values,” by Dimitry Mindlin

Description: This article outlines the 2001 IRC, PBGC, Federal Income Tax, Social Security, and Medicare Amounts

Description: This article describes a simplified problem in pension plan financing and presents two questions about how it can be modeled. Answers to these questions will be discussed and their implications for traditional actuarial models will be presented in Part 2 of the article in the following issue of the newsletter.

Description: Part 2 of an article which presents simplified problem and and presented alternate models. Answers are presented in this article. The author's final question is: If traditional actuarial models stumble over these issues, can we get it right for real world funding pension plans and funding practices?

Description: This article summarizes participant responses from the Retirement Implications of Demographic and Family Change project.

Description: This article reviews the new standard of practice, ASOP 6, and its impact on the actuarial assumptions that actuaries use for valuations of retiree group medical and life benefits.