Tag: Actuarial

Swapping a risk for a crisis

Last week, the Bank of England stepped in with rescue measures to prevent a crisis in UK pension funds. For most people who expect to depend on a pension fund for their financial well-being – either now or in the future – news of the crisis came at the same time as news of the rescue, so we were reassured even before we knew that we needed to panic. But the rescue arrangements end on 14 October. Pension fund managers, and those who oversee them, have just 10 days to get things sorted if the problem isn’t to start up again.

A conversation with my doctor

The medication was giving me side effects so uncomfortable that I felt the pills were just protecting me in order that I could be miserable. I wanted to stop taking them and the GP agreed. “But first”, he said, “let’s just take a look at the numbers.”

Two sides of the same story

A mathematical postscript to the fairy tale in New York that tells me I need to learn to relax more when I watch tennis. 😧

Submission to BEIS

In 2016, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) issued a regulation known as TAS 100, which governs certain activities that are open to anyone to undertake. But the regulation applies only when the activity is carried out by an actuary. This has created the anomalous position that:

Accountants in a tangle with Webb

Regular readers of this blog must be sick to death by now of me repeating how much damage accounting standards are doing to pension schemes (here, here, here and, even on video, here). So I’ll be brief this time – very, very brief. There is finally light at the end of the accounting tunnel.

You mean we’re NOT supposed to avoid tax?

Tax avoidance has become a hot topic. The Times newspaper has recently unmasked a scheme in which income tax is avoided by the ludicrously simple means of saying the salary is only a loan which might have to be repaid (but never actually is). One of the newspaper’s columnists, David Aaronovitch, has been writing about the immorality of tax avoidance (both links behind a paywall).

I used to think it was easy to spot the moral dividing line when it came to tax avoidance. If our government had created the exemption, that meant they positively wanted us to take advantage of it. Anything else was almost certainly a loophole and morally objectionable, even if it was legal. But does that distinction still apply?

Shoot the messenger!

Financial accounts are supposed to enable readers to understand the financial position of the entity under review. But, yesterday, the National Association of Pension Funds published a report attacking the notion that accounts provide neutral and reliable information about an employer’s pension scheme liabilities. The critique, written for the NAPF by Dr Iain Clacher and Professor Peter Moizer of Leeds University Business School, is pretty damning of the standard setters.

What equal pay teaches us about the Human Rights Act

The European courts have been causing controversy (again). Judgements handed down in Brussels and Strasbourg have left conservatives (small “c”) aghast and Liberals (big and small “L”) defending the rights-based approach. But scratch beneath the surface and, often, it’s not the rights that objectors object to. The problem is that, so often, the rights awarded in Europe aren’t what we were led to expect when those rights were introduced.

Accountants becoming effective?

I think the three words at the end of the following sentence must be the most chilling – and the most heart-warming – I have ever read from an accounting standard-setter:

The Hutton Contribution

I had always thought that employee contributions into a pension scheme were a mistaken idea. Should I be re-thinking that in the light of Hutton’s report out today? Or should Lord Hutton?