Frank Wilcox
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Your line is open
Yeah, so we implemented that new accounting principle this quarter widely known as CECL. And for us, there are three broad categories where we have credit exposure. We've got credit exposure to the extent that policyholders don't pay their premium. We have credit exposure to the extent that we don't collect monies that were due from our reinsurers. And then finally, inherently within our fixed income portfolio, the debt securities present us with credit risk as well.Now, I'll handle each one of those individually, but back -- during the latter part or actually during 2019, we tested CECL model on the various parts of those -- that I just discussed to see what the potential impact would be. And we found that in all instances, they would be immaterial. That being said, we did implement it and we put some disclosures in our 10-Q, including an adjustment to the beginning retained earnings, which is appropriate under these circumstances.So, when you look at the premiums receivable inherently in our business is a business model that includes collecting the vast majority of the premium before we earned that. So, when you look at our book of business, we have about $1.4 billion of enforced premium. And yet we only have a receivable of about $65 billion from agents.Historically, our write-off of those uncollectible amounts are somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 a year. Obviously, as we grow they incrementally grow with that growth. And then the balance that we historically carry, as an allowance for those receivables is somewhere around $600,000 or $700,000. So, we don't feel that the CECL model has caused us to reevaluate that. So, we're continuing with that model. So, once again, the agent -- balances receivable not material under CECL.And then secondly, the reinsurance recoverables, reinsurance recoverables are collateralized by amounts either held in trust or letters of credit that we gain or gathered from certain reinsurers. So we -- the vast majority of that is collateralized. In our history we've not had an incident where we'd had to write-off any sort of uncollected amount from a reinsurer. So, once again, not material. We didn't put any adjustments on the books in the first quarter for reinsurance recoverables.And then finally the investment portfolio, the average credit quality of our investment portfolio is A plus. And during this quarter -- during the COVID pandemic and to date, we've only seen three downgrades and it's just not material to our book of business. Obviously, we're going to continue to monitor that as a lot of the credit agencies -- the rating agencies catch up with those. But I mentioned before that we had done several calculations in anticipation of adopting this, including -- looking at the unrealized lost balance that we had at 12/31/18, June 30, 12/31/19 and then again at 3/31 of this year. And none of those amounts calculated under the CECL model exceeded $1 million.So what we chose to do is based upon the calculation that was yielded as of 3/31, we decided to put up a standing allowance for that effective January1 and that was just under $800,000 and had an after tax effect on retained earnings of less than $600,000.So, as you can see for us, clearly not material, but we will continue to monitor the credit quality of the investment portfolio and take appropriate actions. And as Steve said, to the extent that we see anything arising, we'll be out there letting folks know.