Candidate Information: Margaret Berger

Margaret Berger

Practice Area: Pension
Employer: Mercer
City, State: Princeton, N.J.
Credentials: MAAA, FSA, FCA, EA

Margaret Berger graduated from Yale with a degree in mathematics in 1990 and has been working in the pension actuarial field for 30 years, all of that time at Mercer. She started as a retirement consultant focusing on private pension plans, and is currently working in Mercer’s Law & Policy Group, developing internal and external intellectual capital as part of a team that analyzes health, wealth and global legislative, regulatory, judicial, and government relations issues. Margaret is part of Mercer’s Actuarial Resource Network, a group of senior actuaries who provide technical guidance to Mercer’s U.S. retirement consultants, and serves as one of the company’s subject matter experts on a wide variety of technical matters including IRS nondiscrimination and minimum coverage testing activities, pension funding and accounting valuations, retirement plan administration and compliance activities.

She served on the New Jersey Pension and Benefit Study Commission from 2014 to 2015, a nonpartisan state task force formed to make recommendations regarding the goals and criteria for a sustainable retirement and health benefit system, and has volunteered on a number of Academy and other professional committees, including the Pension Committee, the Pension Practice Council, and the Actuarial Standards Board Pension Committee. Margaret frequently speaks at professional conferences on legal and technical matters, as well as actuarial ethics. She is married with three sons, all math and computer science geeks, and is also a certified grammar nut who loves to find egregious grammatical errors on TV shows and post them to Facebook.

The Academy’s mission is to serve the public and the U.S. actuarial profession. How will your service on the Board allow you to further the Academy’s mission of public policy and professionalism?

I will help support our profession as we navigate these turbulent and unprecedented times, when the fishbowl of social media magnifies the significance of every statement we make and each position we take. As a Board member, I will help ensure the Academy remains sensitive to the difficult and complex issues we face from within the profession and from the public and press, while remaining responsive to our members’ needs for a robust professionalism support system.

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