A Plea for Communication About Communications!

by Ken Hartwell, Member, Actuarial Standards Board

The second exposure draft of the proposed Actuarial Standard of Practice (ASOP) on Actuarial Communications was approved by the Actuarial Standards Board (ASB) at its March 2001 meeting. The exposure draft has been distributed to CAS members for comments. The deadline for comments is September 15, 2001.

The General Committee of the ASB was established in 1997 to promulgate ASOPs that cut across the four practice areas of casualty, health, life, and pensions. In that same year, the committee began work on this proposed ASOP. The first exposure draft was issued in November 1998, and the committee received 23 comment letters. Many of these letters were quite long and dealt with a variety of aspects of the exposure draft. The letters were instrumental in helping the committee move forward to a second exposure draft.

This ASOP is intended to replace Interpretive Opinion No. 3, Professional Communications of Actuaries. One of the major changes from the first exposure is the inclusion of oral communications (see Appendix 2 of the second exposure draft), which are now covered explicitly by the Code of Professional Conduct.

We held back the second exposure draft while the ASB was dealing with the revisions to the Code of Professional Conduct that were subsequently adopted by the five U.S.-based actuarial organizations effective January 1, 2001. Meanwhile, the ASB posted a revised draft of this ASOP as a discussion draft on the ASB Web Site, the first time we had done this. Quite frankly, we were disappointed that we received no comment letters at all.

Our goal is to promulgate ASOPs that provide useful and practical guidance for actuaries. Many ASOPs affect the work we do only a few times a year, but this proposed ASOP provides guidance that is relevant day in and day out to the activities of many actuaries. We have worked hard not to impose unreasonable requirements on actuaries.

Please tell us if we succeeded, and let us know what improvements should still be considered. If you mislaid your hard copy of the second exposure draft, you can get another from the American Academy of Actuaries. Call the Academy office or go to the Academy Web Site (http://www.actuary.org/proposedstnds.htm).