Description: Summary of Administration's FY 2023 Tax Proposals of Interest to Life Insurers

Description: This article is an interview of Stuart Klugman, senior staff fellow for Education at the SOA, who explains the changes to the pathway to earn the ASA designation.

Description: The article describes the factors that should determine the asset allocation of an employer's QDIA, especially Target Date Funds, and suggests that in general QDIAs have insufficient equity in retirement asset allocations.

Description: A discussion of the process and results report “A Study of the Use of the Delphi Method, A Futures Research Technique for Forecasting Selected U.S. Economic Variables and Determining Rationales for Judgments.”

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: This article is an update on the No Surprises Act, which is a U.S. Act aimed to reduce the risk that a person unexpectedly receives out of network charges for their health care visits.

Description: Frist Quarter 2022 updates on tax issues involving: IRS publication of 7702 60-month avg. applicable federal interest rates, OECD Global Minimum Tax, final Foreign Tax Credit regulations issued by Treasury and IRS, Final Regulations on Tax Issues Associated with LIBOR Transition issued by Treasury and IRS, and the Multistate Tax Commission Partnership Project focusing on insurer investment partnerships.

Description: GAAP's elimination of gross profit as a basis for amortization of deferred acquisition costs enables the accounting for reinsurance of universal life contracts to better reflect the economic protection provided by reinsurance. It also makes it easier to assess the effectiveness of different techniques. Building on the analysis of an earlier article, "A Fresh Look at Accounting for Reinsurance of Universal Life," this article presents a practical approach to estimating the ineffectiveness of several existing techniques at accounting for the economic protection provided by reinsurance. The article ends with a summary of what a company might do to improve the effectiveness of its reinsurance accounting.

Description: The paper describes a cost-benefit analysis to determine the value of electronic health records (EHRs) in life insurance accelerated underwriting programs. Sample cases from a carrier were underwritten pre-EHR and post-EHR and the mortality savings estimates from risk class changes using EHRs was compared to procurement costs. Results were developed to cover a range of scenarios. Factors to consider for carriers evaluating the cost-effectiveness of using EHRs in their own accelerated underwriting programs are also described.

Description: In this article, the author provides an update, as of April 2023, on the Reinsurance Section’s sponsored research in process and studies recently completed.