The Meaning of Your Membership

Membership in the American Academy of Actuaries means that you recognize yourself as a member of a profession—a profession that holds itself to high standards of conduct, practice, and qualification and strives to serve the public as well as the U.S. actuarial profession. The Academy’s work in professionalism and public policy provides valuable benefits to every member of our profession. As a professional, you know that your reputation is important—and you help maintain your individual reputation for being impartial, nonpartisan, and unbiased by being part of a membership that is known collectively for being impartial, nonpartisan, and unbiased through the policies, procedures, and culture that the Academy embodies in its work.

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Professionalism

Your membership reflects the profession’s self-regulatory structure that is housed at the Academy. Through important professionalism resources, bodies, and activities, the Academy enhances the value of your credential and professional independence of the actuarial profession.

Academy membership also provides you with the ability to support and maintain the high level of professionalism we expect of each other:

• Code of Professional Conduct
• U.S. Qualification Standards
• Actuarial standards of practice (ASOPs), developed by the Actuarial Standards Board
• Applicability Guidelines for ASOPs
• Requests for guidance and investigation of potential violations of the Code through the Actuarial Board for Standards and Discipline
• Other professionalism resources, such as webinars and discussion papers

As it does each year, the Academy has held quarterly professionalism webinars in 2018 to help members stay current with developments in the world of actuarial professionalism—and earn necessary professionalism continuing education (CE) at the same time. This year, the Academy presented the following three webinars (a fourth is scheduled for December):

• A Guided Tour of the U.S. Qualification Standards
• The Code of Professional Conduct: Learning From the Mistakes of Others
• The Anatomy of the ASOPs

The Committee on Qualifications (COQ) continues to answer specific questions and provide guidance on existing qualification standards and their applicability to emerging areas of practice. This year the COQ updated its FAQs on the U.S. Qualification Standards regarding statements of actuarial opinions (SAOs) that blend two or more areas of actuarial practice.

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Public Policy

The Academy is dedicated to assuring that public policy is developed amid the sound application of objective actuarial principles. In 2018, Academy committees and work groups offered policymakers and regulators actuarial perspectives on:

• Casualty issues including travel insurance, catastrophe modeling, and retained risk
• Health issues including high-performance networks, association health plans, and prescription drug costs
• Life issues including tax reserve methods and assumptions, and principle-based reserving
• Pension issues including national retirement policy, pension funding principles, and multiemployer plan reforms
• Risk management and financial reporting issues including International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 17, and own risk and solvency assessment (ORSA) reporting

The Academy is invited to testify before congressional committees and state and federal regulatory bodies, assuring that the actuarial perspective is a part of important policy development considerations. The Academy’s credibility on public policy issues reflects positively on and to its members.