[wideawake]

These sure sound like third-party death contracts to me. Gaining a benefit from someone's death is a perversion. Illegal contracts in my book.

This is an unrealistic way to look at it.

When a person pays into an insurance policy over the years, all they get back is the value they put into it, compounded over time plus the appreciation of any investments within the policy.

There is a windfall in the case of a premature death - but even if a top executive died prematurely, the company's total benefit would be a tiny portion of the average quarterly profit. It would necessitate the premature deaths of many, many employees for this to be a profitable "death contract" - and even a suspicion of foul play would destroy the company.

It's just a legal way of parking assets in a tax-free investment.

I wager that any study would demonstrate that people are much safer from foul play when they have their employer as a policy holder rather than a close family member.

[bvw]

Sure its a legit, by code, tax dodge. But the article mentions "contracts" still held on employeees who have left the company. That is a mite suspect, for if it ain't abused yet, it will be.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "He was terminated."!

[bvw]

What's to stop a CFO from waltzing into the local ICUs, and hiring on the ward and then taking out 1 mill a pop (I believe some corp general life policies allow that without medical pre-testing). Those closest to death have a lot of wisdom to offer, you know.

[eeman]

"I wager that any study would demonstrate that people are much safer from foul play when they have their employer as a policy holder rather than a close family member."

An associate of mine (not a friend) who was seemingly normal took out a 500,000 life insurance policy on his wife and bludgeoned her to death that evening.

This dirtbag got off on an insanity plea (the first succsessful insanity defense for murder in Washington state for 20 years). His argument was that he suffered from depression (which is probably true), was under a lot of stress at the time, and seeing the movie "Titanic" pushed him over the edge to a state of "temporary insanity."