Chairperson’s Corner

By Douglas Van Dam

The Financial Reporter, September 2021

Thank you for being a member of the Financial Reporting Section. As I write this, I think it is likely you will receive this while Section elections are open. I urge you to exercise your vote. We have a panel of excellent candidates. The Council and Friends work hard to add value to membership in the Section, the SOA, and to improve the insurance industry.

The Chairperson Corner was a common occurrence in the hard copy days of The Financial Reporter. This is my first “Corner” since the publication has gone digital. With so many changes in standards affecting those of us who focus on preparing and reviewing life insurance company financial statements, we have not had a lack of content to share with you, and I want to give a shout out to the authors for sharing their knowledge with us.

Section membership has been declining and research conducted by the SOA has highlighted that SOA members desire new ways to connect and share. Over the last year a group of SOA members have been evaluating the section model and developing a potential new concept and the SOA Board has approved piloting this concept. I am a big supporter of the work being done by the Community Engagement Strategy Work Group. You will hear more about the community engagement concept in the coming months as a pilot is launched by the end of this year and will continue into 2022. Throughout the pilot the SOA will be gathering member feedback. An assessment will be conducted, and key performance metrics evaluated at the end of the pilot. A recommendation will be put forth to the SOA Board of Directors next fall. I want you to know that the Financial Reporting Section will continue to provide you with valuable information, content, and support in the future just as we have in the past.

The work product of the Section that has been most affected by the pandemic has been our ability to provide continuing education, particularly in-person education and webinars. Last year we had the Valuation Actuary meeting content decided when the cancellation of in-person meetings resulted in moving as much of the content as possible to webinars. Thank you to the staff of the SOA for helping with this transition. It seems like the SOA had a webinar every day in 2020! This year the Valuation Actuary will also be virtual and will be combined with the Life meeting. As we plan for 2022, when hopefully we will be meeting in person again, I am very interested in your views on whether the Valuation Actuary and the Life meeting should continue to be combined into a single meeting.

Speaking of in-person meetings, the SOA 2021 Annual Meeting & Exhibit, which has been renamed ImpACT SOA Annual Conference, will be a hybrid meeting with both in-person and virtual sessions. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Pittsburgh. We will be having our Financial Reporting Section breakfast on Tuesday morning and we would like to see all of you there.

In planning for continuing education, the Society of Actuaries, as a result of feedback received from members and employers, is very interested in providing additional content on communication of results to non-actuaries. If you have a personal example you would like to share, you can contact me, and the Section Council will work with you to prepare the content in any format—meeting topic, webinar, podcast, or article—that is appropriate.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone working on the update to the US GAAP textbook for LDTI and updating the IFRI textbook for last year’s amendments. They are coming. I know you will all want copies! We are also looking at updating other financial reporting resources as appropriate.

Doug Van Dam, FSA, MAAA, is the founder of Van Dam Consulting Group, a senior life consultant at Actuarial Risk Management and chairperson of the Financial Reporting Section. He can be reached at doug@vandamcg.com.