Lucky pursuant

One of the projects I assist the actuary each year is valuation of general insurance business of a client. Up until last year, oftentimes there was problem reconciling their claims data with their accounts. However, starting last year, they took time to perform this reconciliation before passing the claims data to me, of which I am grateful for.

This year was no different but I noted that one particular account's figure that they used in the reconciliation didn't match that with the accounts that they had given me earlier. The difference was about 9%. Generally we treat 10+% as significant and below 5% as insignificant. Judgement is needed for anything in between, bearing in mind the likely impact of that difference on important valuation results. In the end, I decided to pursue it because

  • we had time,
  • it was the only figure that couldn't reconcile and this irked me haha, and
  •  9% is close to 10%

    Turned out that there were changes to the accounts. Aiyo (a word that is now in the Oxford dictionary haha), why didn't they inform me about that and give me updated set of accounts? They did apologise and provide me the amended accounts. 

    I asked and they responded that there was a few other figures that were changed too. I had to then check through all spreadsheets that made use of figures from the accounts, which result in discovery of some diffeences and so I updated them. If I hadn't pursued, then these differences would likely be picked up by the client once they review our draft report and at that stage, the amount of effort to correct them would be much more.

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