Description: This article begins with an overview of how the tax treatment of partial exchanges has evolved over the last decade or so, including the concerns that led the Service to resist giving taxpayers carte blanche on such transactions.The new guidance shortens from 12 to six months the window following a partial exchange in which the transaction could be called into question, and simplifies the regime by de-linking it from the exceptions to the section 72q penalty tax.4 Finally, the guidance provides coordination with recent partial annuitization legislation and answers to other open issues. This article then summarizes Rev. Proc. 2011-38 and elaborates on why the features outlined above are important and helpful improvements over prior guidance.

Description: At the beginning of this year, Representative Dave Camp (R-MI) retired from the House of Representatives after 12 terms, the last two terms serving as Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. Chairman Camp has played a central role in the national conversation on tax reform, primarily through a series of discussion drafts addressing international tax reform, financial products tax reform, small business tax reform and, most recently, a comprehensive tax reform discussion draft that we explored in a special edition of TAXING TIMES last fall. Kristin Norberg, TAXING TIMES editor, recently sat down with Chairman Camp to talk about his career in the House, the development of the Tax Reform Act of 2014, and some of its potential impacts on the insurance industry.

Description: The article provides an introduction to some of the key limitations that the Internal Revenue Code imposes on business uses of life insurance, focusing on the limitations under Section 264(a) on business deductions for premiums and interest expenses related to life insurance, the similar limitations under Section 264(f) for unrelated interest expenses of businesses that own life insurance, the limitations under Section 101(j) on the excludability of death benefits under employer-owned life insurance contracts, and the recently-enacted rules for life settlement transactions.

Description: Update on tax regulatory and legislative developments of relevance to life actuaries

Description: The rules governing the tax treatment of distributions from life insurance or annuity contracts are complex. Worse, the relevant IRC section, section 72, seems at times to be the product of a conspiracy in restraint of understanding.

Description: Dialogue between Peter Winslow, a tax attorney, and Edward Robbins and Christian DesRochers, tax actuaries, on selected tax issues related to proposals to change statutory reserving from a formula-based methodology to a principles-based approach.

Description: Summarizes IRS private letter ruling PLR 200818018, released Jan. 29, 2008, related to treatment of certain payments under Immediate VAs as SEPPs, and discusses its significance.

Description: Status update on the Separate Account Dividends Received Deduction, SADRD.

Description: This article describes the transfer pricing rules applicable to life reinsurance transactions generally, and then outlines a methodology for testing life reinsurance transactions to demonstrate compliance with transfer pricing standards applied by tax authorities.

Description: This article summarized the Administration's proposals for new tax revenues in 2010 with respect to insurance and offers the ACLI viewpoint.