QUESTION: I ran a valuation and it aborted with this error message: "Before 100% ret. age, the sum of qx probabilities must be less than 1". What caused this and how do I fix it?

ANSWER: This message could be triggered, in a multiple decrement environment, if decrement rates are coded as probabilities, rather than as rates, and the sum of these probabilities for the competing decrements exceeds 1 (e.g., if the termination rate at a particular decrement age is 0.80, the disability rate at that age is 0.15 and the mortality rate is 0.06), which is impossible because no more than 100% of a life / record can decrement out of active status. However, because your active decrements are coded as probabilities ProVal will not adjust the decrement rates for a multi-decrement environment (see our Technical Reference article Decrements: rates vs. probabilities for details) and you have an impossible situation. You should change your Valuation Assumptions to select "rates" rather than "probabilities".

This message could also be triggered if your active decrements are coded as rates (not probabilities) in Valuation Assumptions if either disability rates or mortality rates are set to 1.0 (we would expect this to be a rare occurrence). ProVal permits only termination rates to be 1.0 before the age at which the retirement rate becomes 1.0.

Note that if you have no active decrements pre-retirement other than termination (i.e., both disability and mortality rates are zero before retirement eligibility), so that you have a single-decrement (i.e., termination) environment, and you still get this error message in the U.S. qualified mode, then it is likely that you have not zeroed out mortality pre-decrement for current liability.