The development of life assurance accounting and regulation in the UK: reflections on recent proposals for accounting change

Abstract

At its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, UK life insurance was originally short-term, often one-year, insurance. Its development into a long-term investment medium exposed a tension between the emerging commercial accountancy conventions for stating financial position and results, based on past transactions, and the forward-looking,actuarial approach needed for the valuation of the business for solvency verification and for decisions about distributions.

It is argued here that the first Companies Act in 1844 included insurance companies (unlike banks) with the generality of companies, and subjected them to the same accounting and auditing requirements, by default, as there was not yet sufficient confidence in the techniques and standing of actuaries to rely on specialist actuarial valuations. But the resulting confusion over how to present life insurance company accounts led to gradual recognition of the special nature of the public interest in insurance companies, and the nature of the accounting and other information that should be disclosed continued to be debated at a number of important junctures in the course of the nineteenth century. The major change came when the Life Assurance Companies Act 1870 required periodic actuarial valuation of the life fund. Although this Act also set out a detailed, specialized form of accounts required to show the annual income and expenditure of life companies, in reality these conventional accounts were now little more than an appendage to the actuarial valuation.

The dominance of the actuarial valuation for solvency purposes and for determining the distribution of profits, combined with the continuance, under the Companies Act 1948/1985, of disclosure exemptions which still permit ‘secret reserve’ accounting, have resulted in little attention being paid until recently to the results shown in the accounts of life companies as indicators of managerial and business performance. But the EC Insurance Accounts Directive will shortly remove these exemptions and competitive pressures in the financial services industry have now stimulated interest in developing a new basis for reporting life insurance profits and managerial performance, at least among proprietary companies. The debate over the alternative new bases has reopened the conceptual arguments between the traditional accountancy and actuarial approaches, and the role of accountants and auditors is likely to assume greater importance in the future in an area which has, for over a hundred years, been protected as the specialist province of actuaries.