Description: Yes, it’s been almost a year since Jerry Enoch, my predecessor as editor of The Financial Reporter, introduced the now famous FROSTies and FRUMPies. I am proud to be able to continue the tradition by announcing these prestigious awards again this year for Financial Reporter OutStanding Treatises (FROSTies) and Financial Reporter Uniquely Memorable Papers (FRUMPies). By the time this issue is published those of you who attended the section breakfast at the Annual Meeting in November will have witnessed the FROSTies and FRUMPies Awards Ceremony, at which prizes were given to this year’s winning authors. Next year we expect the ceremony to be carried on national television.

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: Article from The Financial Reporter on the fifth Pan-American Actuarial Congress that took place in the beautiful city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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: June 2008 issue of the Life Insurance Company Financial Reporting Section

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: 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.