Description: Illustrates key differences, in earnings for a segment of term insurance, between current GAAP standards and GAAP targeted improvements (based on tentative board decisions preceding the release of an exposure draft).

Description: In TAM 201149021, the Internal Revenue Service (the “Service”) National Office has ruled that an insurance contract that insures against a decline in market value of assets leased to third parties is not an insurance contract for federal income tax purposes.

Description: Observations from the author's experiences auditing blocks of LTCI business.

Description: Insights from chief accounting, legal and tax actuary on best practices for collaboration on product development and financial reporting.

Description: This article is an introduction to the principles of taxation of U.S. owned foreign insurance operations, such as controlled foreign corporations.

Description: This article gives the highlights of the 88-page report including detailed assumptions for products including universal life with secondary guarantees (ULSG), cash accumulation universal life (CashAccum), current assumption universal life (CAUL), indexed universal life (IUL) and variable universal life (VUL). The 29 companies and 83 products represented in the report allow for an interesting perspective on premium persistency assumptions used in pricing, cash flow testing (CFT) and generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)/international financial reporting standard (IFRS) functions. This article covers some general results and ULSG-specific results.

Description: The article summarizes Executive Orders from early in the Trump Administration that could affect the ability of IRS to publish tax guidance.

Description: Following the referendum in the UK on June 23 the UK is likely to leave the EU in the near future. While the terms of this separation will not be known for many months, this article aims to explore the possible implications that US insurers may face.

Description: A regulator's perspective on the changing insurance and financial services industry, including changes in the state regulatory environment driven by the regulators themselves, as well as potential changes in the competitive environment prompted by the Financial Services Modernization Act.

Description: The impact of bond default risk on retirement benefit obligations describes how the probability default on a bond is similar to the probability of death for an annuitant. Bonds are used to cash flow match retirement obligations cash flows to funding from bond. Just as the probability of non-payment happens on the liability side, we can do the same with selected bonds. The end result may be an adjustment to the discount rates used.