Captive Insurance Editing and Proofreading Services

A captive is formed, premiums are paid, and four years later a tax authority asks what it is for. The file contains a feasibility study, a business plan and board minutes — all of which describe the savings. None of them describes why this is insurance rather than a company setting money aside, which is the only question being asked.

We edit what captive owners, managers and their advisers produce — feasibility studies and business plans, board minutes and governance documentation, underwriting and pricing files, risk distribution and business purpose documentation, regulatory applications and returns, reinsurance and fronting arrangements, and the responses given when a captive is examined. Our editors work on documents whose purpose is to be defensible years later.

The business purpose documentation is what a captive stands or falls on, and its failure is a record that reads as a tax structure with an insurance wrapper. The savings are the outcome; they cannot also be the reason. We work through these so the risk being insured is described as a real exposure with its history, since a captive covering a risk the group has never suffered and cannot quantify is difficult to defend and easy to write about honestly if the exposure is real; so the non-tax reasons for forming it are documented at the time rather than reconstructed — access to reinsurance, cover the commercial market will not write, control of claims handling, stability of pricing — because contemporaneous minutes are worth far more than a later explanation; so the risk distribution arrangement is described in operational terms with the numbers, given that this is the technical question and a description that avoids it invites the conclusion that nobody thought about it; so the premiums are supported by an actuarial or broker rationale showing how the price was set, as a premium that matches the desired deduction and nothing else is the pattern examiners look for; so claims are handled and documented as claims, with notification, adjustment and payment records, since a captive that has never paid a claim in the way an insurer would is not behaving as one; so the governance is minuted with decisions actually taken by the captive's own board; so the arrangement's economics are stated including the scenario where the captive loses money; and so every document says the same thing. Files built this way survive examination.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including structures, premiums, claims and regulatory correspondence. We are editors rather than actuaries, tax advisers or lawyers, and we give no tax or legal advice and no view on any structure, arrangement or filing. What we can do is make the record say what was actually decided and why.