Financial and membership comparisons of SOA/CAS/IFoA and possibly other actuarial organisations

Professional Actuarial Topics Actuarial Politics
1

I’m carrying out a comparison of various actuarial organisations.

The information I’m interested in is detailed income and expenditure, reserves, numbers of new members each year, numbers of exams taken, breakdown of membership by category, country and sex.

I know where to find information for the IFoA (e.g. Annual reports although these don’t show as much information about membership statistics as they used to).

But I’m unfamiliar with the SOA and CAS websites.

For the CAS I have found Annual Reports | Casualty Actuarial Society, although these reports seem to only have one page on financials (e.g. see page 31 https://www.casact.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/Annual_Report_2023.pdf) with little or no information on the salary/wage bill, number of employees. Is more detail available anywhere?

For the SOA there doesn’t seem to be a comparable page with annual reports for each year. A search for Annual Reports only brought up this one for 2021-2022 (https://www.soa.org/49a50c/globalassets/assets/files/static-pages/about/2021-2022-financial-results.pdf) and this for 2018-2019 (2018–2019 Financial Results - The Actuary Magazine). The financial results in these are very sparse, with a breakdown of revenue but no breakdown of expenditure.

Any help please as to whether I can find the information?

2

Yeah, it’s a pain in the butt to get to the tax filings, etc.

the SOA split itself up into 2 bits in 2019, which complicates things – a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) entity –

So here are the two ProPublica links that may be helpful:

Society of Actuaries: 501(c)(3) – the older bit – but you should look at it, too

Society Of Actuaries Professional Association: 501(c)(6) – the bigger piece now

The two are both non-profits, but they get different treatment under U.S. tax policy, yadda yadda yadda.

Anyway, they are not required to report -all- their employees, but their most highly-compensated employees. You will get some of the info. There are reporting lags.

4 Likes
3

That’s interesting that Pro Publica is the best source.

1 Like
4

Most other sources that aggregate 990 info are like Charity Navigator, so they focus on whether they are using your charity dollars efficiently, on programs, etc.

But a lot of 990-filers (like the SOA) are not really charities.

ProPublica has a different focus, so it spreads its net wider and is trying to show different things.

1 Like
5

Thanks for all this meep.
I can see more detail of income in the ProPublica records, but I’m still struggling to get a handle on expenditure, e.g. how much of members’ dues gets spent on things like (for example):

  • website/digital communications
  • office rent
  • utilities (electricity/heating/telephone/water)
  • travel/accommodation
  • lobbying of regulatory bodies/government/politicians
  • the rest

And while it may be interesting to know that the SOA spent almost $15 million in 2021 on executive and staff salaries/compensation, it would also be useful to know what members got in return, i.e. what services were the staff providing to members for that money (it can’t all have been administration for example).

We have similar issues in the IFoA with regard to getting transparency.