March 23, 2011 Letter to Members

News from the American Academy of Actuaries

March 23, 2011

Dear Academy colleague,

As I reported a few months ago, the Board of Directors added an extra day to its January meeting to review the 19 recommendations contained in the Governance Task Force (GTF) final report. During that meeting, the Board carefully considered all of the issues raised by the GTF and began to examine the specific recommendations detailed in the GTF report. As a result of that work, and to keep the process moving forward, three task forces were created to develop proposals related to the election of regular directors, the composition of the Board of Directors, and leadership development.

Since that time, the Board has received and discussed several proposals from the elections and board composition task forces. After lively discussion and thoughtful deliberation, the Board voted on several motions this week to advance elements of these proposals. While some of the details remain to be worked out, in the interest of transparency, I want to outline the governance changes that the Board has endorsed. Some of these changes, of course, will require bylaws changes, which ultimately will be determined by a vote of all members.

Directionally speaking, the Board has agreed to:

Utilize electronic voting for the election of regular directors on a one-year trial basis;
Designate the immediate past president to serve as the chairperson of the Board to ease the administrative responsibilities of the president; and
Eliminate the penultimate past president position on the Board to shorten the total presidential time commitment from four years to three, as recommended by the GTF.

The Board will continue to discuss additional governance changes and will continue to define the details of these directional changes.

On behalf of the Board, I thank you for your patience and support as we work through all the particulars and discuss other potential changes. It is our sincere intention to address as many issues as we can now, so that the implementation of these changes will run as smoothly as possible.

Kind regards,

Mary Frances Miller
President
American Academy of Actuaries