Description: IACA, and IAA Section has a key role to play at ICA, held only every 4 years. This feature gives you a flavour of IACA highlights in Berlin, June 2018.

Description: LTCI: Using Modified Natural Reserves as opposed to NAIC valuation reserves to accumulate margins for moderately adverse experience or to analyze experience as it develops.

Description: Humor in the workplace can improve productivity. This article describes a typical office relationship problem and how humor helped disparate teams work together.

Description: The article summarizes PLRs 201515001 and 201519001, in which the IRS addressed the treatment of a non-qualified deferred annuity contract under the investor control doctrine and other applicable rules. The contract provides a guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit and investment options that correspond to “public” mutual funds. The IRS concluded that the investor control doctrine will apply to treat the contract purchaser as the owner of the mutual fund shares for federal income tax purposes. The IRS also addressed certain other tax aspects of the arrangement. The effect of the rulings is that the contract will be taxed similarly to a contingent deferred annuity (where the policyholder holds the mutual fund shares in his or her own brokerage account), while being structured like a traditional deferred variable annuity (where the insurance company holds the shares in its separate account).

Description: Hear from the editor’s on the March 2017 issue of Risk Management published by the JRMS.

Description: By necessity, attributions of financial processes require approximations. Tools used for approximations include Aumann-Shapley, time step, step-through, average step-through, partial derivative, and average partial derivative. Significantly non-linear paths can cause problems during attribution. Time (theta) and market factors must be handled concurrently. Typically contractual factors can be handled separately. Average Step-Through, Aumann-Shapley and Aumann-Shapley-3 points perform the best given the same time period. Attribution should be done with fairly small time steps as opposed to using a lot of points in the Aumann-Shapley calculation, but using Aumann-Shapley-3 points as a last step has some advantages.

Description: The article summarizes a session on asset validation; the featured speakers were an investment manager, a company investment actuary, and a consultant.

Description: Hear from the editor’s on the August 2016 issue of Risk Management published by the JRMS.