Check Your Lenses to See Properly

Which lenses are you wearing right now? Come on, take a look. Are they the right ones?

No, this is not one of those cheesy Ray-Ban coupons that litter social media. This is about consulting.

Which lenses are you wearing right now?

I think it's a good question.

If you're like me, you've been wearing glasses or contact lenses for a long time in order to see more clearly. In my case, I wear progressive lenses (readers, mid-range, and distance all in one) for every day and work and I wear distance only lenses for sports. In case you're wondering, it's not easy to hit a tennis ball well when the size of the ball changes as you look through different parts of your lens.

But, back to consulting, did you check to see which lenses you are wearing?

Let's consider a simple example. I'm an actuary. A lot of the people I work with -- my peers -- are also actuaries. My clients generally are not.

If I am writing a memo for internal consumption by other actuaries, i can wear my actuarial lens. There is a high expectation that my readers will understand my position in the ways that I want them to understand it.

But, suppose I need to take that same memo and send it to a client. My client may not know the difference between a carryover balance and a prefunding balance. My client may not understand that PBO and ABO do not move necessarily in lockstep. My client may not even know what any of these things are.

So, when I write to my client, I explain things to them at the level that I perceive is right for them. Or, put differently, when going from my internal actuarial memo to my external consulting memo, I've changed lenses. In the first case, my lenses are thick and monocular. In the second case, they are gradual and at least binocular as I translate from that which is hard to see at a distance to something that my client can see easily close up.

My lenses have an emotional side to them as well. And, there's a fancy name for it, well not so fancy. Empathy. I try the best I can to put myself in my client's shoes -- to put myself in their position and to write for their benefit, not for anyone else's.

That's hard. When we write a consulting piece, we all want to seem brilliant to our clients. We take off that client lens and put on our own lens just dazzle from the keyboard with thoughts so profound and complex that we must truly be in a league of our own. But, who knows it? The poor client who reads it gets bored. They put it down. They call a competitor for a translation.

Uh oh, or if you are a fan of Scooby Doo, rutro.

So, let's take off our own lens and put the client lens back on. In doing so, we rewrite our masterpiece on the intricacies of an Internal Revenue Code section whose mere label fills up an entire line and simplify it. We make it so that our client can understand it. Yes, I know, we think we have dumbed it down. But, really, that client lens is the empathy lens. Done properly, our client doesn't find it dumbed down, but just right.

Now, our client thinks we are brilliant.

Fitting a Square Retirement Peg Into a Round Hole

I just don't get it. We knew what they were and honestly, they may have been well defined before then, but in 1974, Congress saw fit to codify defined benefit plans (DB) and defined contribution plans (DC) in ERISA. At the time, there was no Section 401(k) in the Internal Revenue Code.

It was also pretty clear back then. Pension plans were required to offer annuity options. Plans that were not pension plans (mostly profit sharing plans) were not required to offer annuity options. And ERISA said it was good.

In a profit sharing plan, a participant's accrued benefit was his or her account balance, generally. In a pension plan, generally, a participant's accrued benefit was the amount of his or her annuity. And ERISA said it was good.

But, time went by and despite ERISA saying things were good, Congress decided to tinker. And, as a group, Congress has few tools in its bag of tricks that exceed its ability to tinker. It usually works like this. Representative A introduces a bill and she has just enough votes locked up that she can almost get it through the House. And, Representative B comes to her with an idea and says that if you'll just add this one [stupid] provision, I'll vote with you and I can drag C, D, E, F, G, and H along.

That's how the sausage is made in the tinkering factory.

So, once upon a time, we had this round retirement hole (the structure that ERISA gave us) and it was good. It worked pretty well. The evidence of that is that people who spent a good part of their careers under the structure developed in ERISA have generally retired and if they planned at all well, their retirements are not at all bad compared to their working lifetimes.

But, as Congress saw fit to tinker with the rules, it found ways, among others, through bills known as Pension Protection Act[s] to convince employers to get rid of pensions. That's right, Pension Protection Acts killed pensions.

Irony.

So, through Pension Protection Acts, workers were suddenly left with nothing but account balances and through improved awareness of health risks and better medical care, they were also left with longer life spans. Those account balances that were perfectly sufficient to get them to the age 75 or so that was their life expectancy at birth had no chance of getting them to their new life expectancy that was closer to 85.

Now what?

The hue and cry was for annuities. And, thus Congress began to tinker again. How could they possibly fit this square account balance peg into the round annuity hole. So, Congress explored ideas for annuities in DC plans.

But, you see that if you offer actuarially equivalent annuities from a DC plan, then you have gains and losses and that would essentially be a DB plan. If you offer insurance company provided annuities (and recall that insurance companies are in business to make money), then you have too small of an annuity.

Oh the ignominy of the square peg.

We had a perfectly good system. It came with perfectly good benefits and for most plans, perfectly good actuarial assumptions and methods.

And Congress broke it. And after all these years, despite taking file and rasp and hammer to the square peg, the round hole remains empty.

Congress, there are smart people who do not sit in your chambers. Give us your objectives and let us find you a solution. We'll make that peg round and Americans will be able to look forward to their golden years again.

ERISA will once again say it is good.