The Deep Dive Blog

A forensic accountant's read on the fastest-growing blind spot in life and annuity balance sheets — what the aggregate numbers show, what the carrier-level numbers show, and why the second set is worse. Most of the warnings you have read about life and annuity carriers in the last two years have ...

For financial advisors, the primary promise made to clients is simple: when the time comes, the insurance carrier will be there to pay the claim. But what happens when the very assets backing those promises are locked away in illiquid investments that are hard to take full advantage of during a ...

When evaluating a life and annuity carrier, what determines whether a client's long-term retirement security is genuinely safe? It isn't a high-end marketing brochure, and it isn't an impressive corporate headquarters. The absolute bedrock of an insurance company’s solvency is its statutory surplus.

To truly understand how modern life and annuity insurance carriers operate, you must understand a fundamental distinction that Wall Street relies on, but the average policyholder doesn’t understand. We’re referring to the difference between GAAP and SAP.

At Deep Dive Analytics (DDA), we don’t look at the marketing brochures or the "A+" ratings from agencies that often miss the forest for the trees. Instead, we rely on the decades of experience of our founder, forensic accountant and CFE Tom Gober. Tom has spent four decades pulling back the curtain ...

The essence of a Life and Annuity (L&A) insurance carrier is the long-term promise: a commitment to pay a future death benefit or provide retirement income decades down the line. To keep this promise, a carrier must operate with prudence, prioritize solvency, and maintain transparent, ...

As a Certified Fraud Examiner and Forensic Accountant who has spent 40 years conducting deep-dive analyses of the U.S. insurance industry, I have seen a lot of financial chicanery. But few maneuvers are as brazen, yet as consistently overlooked by the public and regulators, as the insurance ...