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By Dan
Gengler, Internal Actuary, Montana State Fund;
Michele Blumhagen, Quality Assurance Director, ND Workforce Safety & Insurance
 What
can we do to improve the value of the AASCIF Fact Book? This was
the question the Audit and Statistics Committee posed to you, our
members, in the 2008 2nd Quarter AASCIF newsletter. We solicited
your feedback via an online survey tool and received feedback from
17 AASCIF members. The responses were generally from among senior
management. Here is what we heard from you:
- 11 members (65%) valued the AASCIF Fact Book as a reference
tool. 6 members (35%) said they did not.
- When asked what aspects
of the current Fact Book are valued most, the predominant response
from 13 members was the financial
data and other statistics and the fact that such data was gathered into
a single reference source.
- When asked whether your organizations
used the Fact Book, 9 members said yes (53%) while 8 (47%) did
not.
- When asked the most common purpose for using the Fact Book,
10 members responded. All said that their organizations use
the Fact Book primarily to benchmark their own company results against peer
AASCIF members.
- 12 members (75%) said they provide current
updates each year to the Fact Book while 4 members (25%) do not.
- When
asked the reasons why members did not provide updates, 7 members
mentioned three reasons: 1) responding to the Fact Book is
a significant workload for questionable or unknown value; 2) the Fact Book was
not of value since other members don’t update; and
3) there was no need to provide updates since the member’s
data is already available on their company’s website.
- We received the following suggestions from 13 members on
how we can improve the Fact Book: 1) eliminate general narratives
on economic
conditions, legislation, etc; 2) keep the information and
data in the Fact Book current; 3) better benchmarking data, both
operational
and financial; 4) include contact information; 5) include
links to member websites, specifically direct links to annual
reports;
6) compile a separate publication of the top “best
practices” each
organization is most proud of; and 7) refresh the AASCIF
website to improve traffic as well as provide easy navigation
to the Fact
Book.
The Audit and Statistics Committee would like to thank the
members who provided us with this very useful feedback. Based
on the
comments we received, we believe there is support for continuing
the Fact
Book but restructured to focus on a limited number of key
financial and operational data elements that support benchmarking
statistics.
The Audit and Statistics Committee will be proposing to
the Executive Committee a new format for the AASCIF Fact
Book.
General narratives
would be eliminated. We envision collecting and publishing
this data in an Excel spreadsheet that can then be queried,
sorted,
and manipulated to produce any number of benchmark statistics
of interest. We anticipate that the data elements would
be limited in number and well defined such that submissions
would take an
employee one hour or less to collect the relevant numbers
from standard company documents. The information collected
would generally
be found in publicly available documents. The value added
would be to assemble this data in a single, one-stop-shopping
source
that can be manipulated and “data-mined” by
AASCIF members.
Our goal is to make the Fact Book a more useful reference
tool for our members, while reducing the workload associated
with
annual updates. By reducing the time required to complete
annual updates
and by making submissions more definitive such that the
task can be delegated to non-senior staff, we hope to improve
the response
rate. The Executive Committee will be reviewing our proposed
changes at the annual conference in August.
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