Monday, March 2, 2015

Genworth Finds Material Weakness In Its Long Term Care Accounting (GNW)

The old joke is "People become actuaries because they don't have the charisma to become accountants".
Here you might substitute "brains".
Additionally GE is looking damn smart for spinning it out in 2004 whereas hedgie John Paulson is looking pretty dumb.
$7.32 down 5.55%.
From Bloomberg:
Genworth Financial Inc., the insurer that posted two straight quarterly losses tied to reserve shortfalls at its long-term care unit, said it found a material weakness in its accounting for the coverage.

“We are currently working to remediate the material weakness,” the Richmond, Virginia-based company said in a regulatory filing. “We did not have adequate controls designed and in place to ensure that we correctly implemented changes made to one of the methodologies as part of our comprehensive long-term care insurance claim reserves review.”

The disclosure adds to challenges for Chief Executive Officer Tom McInerney after the company was stripped of its investment-grade credit rating and shares dropped by half in the 12 months through Friday. An Australia mortgage insurance unit, which the company had highlighted as a strong performer, had its outlook cut to negative by Moody’s Investors Service on Feb. 20 after announcing the end of a deal with Westpac Banking Corp.

The insurer said in the filing that it initially failed to identify a $44 million calculation error tied to a review of long-term care reserves. The company said it’s working to fix the problem by separating actuarial teams and by expanding the scope of reviews when it changes assumptions or methods. Genworth said it plans to fix the problems this year.

The shares dropped after Genworth disclosed the weakness, losing 8 percent to $7.13 at 2:03 p.m. in New York.

Genworth posted net losses of $844 million in the third quarter of last year and $760 million in the fourth. The day after the latter report, Chief Financial Officer Marty Klein told investors that the company was assessing whether there were accounting shortcomings.

Nursing Homes
Long-term care coverage helps pay for home-health aides and nursing home stays. Some customers pay premiums for decades before the insurer knows if it will incur claims costs.

Accounting for the contracts involves periodically reevaluating the percentage of policyholders who submit claims and the cost per person. Lower interest rates also force the company to change profitability assumptions, because they mean that insurers earn less on bonds held to back obligations....MORE