Description: When a life insurance company changes its basis for computing tax reserves, a special 10-year spread rule found in section 807(f) of the Internal Revenue Code applies to the change. But, what happens if the statutory accounting for original issue discount (OID) or bond premium changes? A discussion follows.

Description: A reflection on the need/desire for one right answer when there isn't one

Description: Performance measurement is not the primary purpose of either GAAP or statutory accounting. This article discusses alternative methods of reporting used by life insurance companies to better measure financial performance.

Description: Discussion of what is included within the scope of Enterprise Risk Management and why it is of significance to the jobs of financial reporting actuaries

Description: A discussion of life insurance securitizations and how they can be structured to provide surplus relief associated with onerous reserve requirements.

Description: The selection of the economic capital calculation approach becomes more of a modeling decision. Now let us pause here and think about the arbitrage-free assumption at the beginning. At any time, there can be only one price on any asset. If the company considers the price calculated above as the fair price for its products, then it must hold true that the same price has to be arrived at if the company uses a real-world pricing approach instead of a risk-neutral approach. This gives us a very good basis to calibrate the appro- priate economic capital.

Description: Article discussing the Life Actuarial Task Force exposure of potential revisions to AG33.

Description: A study on stochastic simulation literature as it applies to a health actuary.

Description: The Health Plan Employee Data and Information Set 'HEDIS' is a set of standardized performance measures initially designed to enable purchasers of health care to evaluate and compare a managed care plan’s administrative performance. The National Committee for Quality Assurance, known as the NCQA, developed HEDIS in 1991. Since its introduction, HEDIS has become a widely used tool for measuring a broad array of health plan functions. This study evaluates the reliability and validity of HEDIS measures. It also reviews the usefulness of HEDIS as an indicator of health care quality.

Description: “Non-traditional” guarantees refer to guarantees that are in addition to traditional mortality, expense, and interest guarantees. Examples of such types of guarantees are death and living benefits on variable annuity contracts and no-lapse guarantees on universal life or variable universal life products. The purpose of this paper is to offer practitioners an overview of the various issues concerning the pricing of these guarantees, the many other issues which need to be analyzed and addressed in the determination of risks and the management of the block of business, and the results of a company survey of practices. This paper is based on the working knowledge of the authors, a broad compilation of literature and the company survey results. At the end of most sections of the paper, we have provided a list of resources which we have selected as some of the best sources available for those practitioners interested in researching the subject matter further.