Description: Author proposes an improvement and simplification of our theory of financial reporting by organizing them around the free cash-flow model. As will be demonstrated here, this will lead us to a compact, simple and intuitively elegant model, which captures all actuarial reporting concerns and which also unifies with ideas in mainstream financial accounting.

Description: This article compares and contrasts existing and near future differences in fair value requirements between US GAAP and IFRS. The focus of this article is on fair value requirements as they relate to actuarial valuations of insurance contracts - including certain contracts classified as investment contracts, and therefore ignores implications on investments held by insurance companies.

Description: Column discussing developments in insurance accounting from January - March.

Description: Summarizes the major provisions of the International Accounting Standards Board’s recent exposure draft entitled Insurance Contracts, regarding a full accounting standard for insurance.

Description: Discusses the meeting of the Accounting Committee of the International Actuarial Association in March.

Description: The authors envision a data warehouse with information at the policy level or lower, and demonstrate how this data can be used to analyze the sources of earnings. The key to their analysis is the data warehouse, which links each policy, not only to valuation assumptions and results, but also to general ledger accounting amounts and to projections - model output that feeds the financial plan.

Description: Discussion of financial regulatory activities from January - March.

Description: The following Executive Summary is an excerpt from a report by Chris O’Brien entitled, “Market-Consistent Valuations of Life Insurance Business: The U.K. Experience.” The purpose of this article is to explain the new valuation approach, set out the issues with implementation and explain how insurers have addressed these issues.

Description: Certain fair value measurements involving actuarial work may not have been required to conform to FAS 157 until late 2008 or early 2009. The purpose of this article is to discuss those items and propose possible methods for actuaries to consider when performing the necessary valuations, from an actuarial standpoint only.

Description: Discusses methods to efficiently run stochastic models in light of AG 43.