The American Academy of Actuaries has launched an initiative to examine retirement systems and public policies affecting retirement security.
The Academy’s new initiative, Retirement for the AGES (alignment, governance, efficiency and sustainability), is intended to provide a framework for well-functioning retirement plans that meet the needs of each of the stakeholders in the retirement-income system.
The framework will serve as the basis for objectively scoring plans, systems, and proposals—an approach that will provide insights on how well they meet retirement-income needs and how they might be improved.
“What has been missing in the debate over America’s retirement systems, and how to improve them, is a common framework for evaluating them,” says Academy president Tom Terry. “Often retirement-income systems are so complex that it’s hard to judge whether they have been well-designed.”
The alignment is based on four principles—alignment, governance, efficiency, and sustainability—that can be used to evaluate the system.