I posted a question last year trying to understand what a "Charge" is:
What exactly does after tax "charge" mean?
But I came back to this GE story and realized I still don't quite understand the full picture. What I understand is that last year GE finally decided to come clean about the state of their LTC business. They decided to be honest with the value of what this business is worth and did so in the form of a one time non-cash charge against earnings -- they devalued this business by $6.2B. So far so good?
Now another big part of this story is their $15B reserve deficiency (They need at least 15B to cover their LTC liabilities). This is where I get confused because it sounds like from the articles I've read that there's an accounting relationship between the two problems such as in this article https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ge-says-shock-multibillion-dollar-insurance-charge-is-a-special-case-2018-01-26. What if any is the relationship between a company (like GE) taking an after-tax charge and their insurance reserves being deficient? And furthermore, is there anything that can be said with certainty about the extent of fraud that GE has engaged in as it relates to their LTC business? Any clarification about what is happening here would be really helpful.
