Perhaps this is perfectly normal, and I just haven’t noticed it before. Then again…
I looked up a member on MSA today to double-check his ID number. He has a life membership, but it says “(Inactive)” to the right of his name at the top of his MSA page. He has not played since 1999; however, I’ve had people before who haven’t played in a while, and I’ve never noticed that “(Inactive)” before. What does it mean? Will his games be ratable?
As authorized by the Bylaws, the office spent most of a year starting in September of 2016 contacting life members for whom we have seen no activity of any kind for several years asking them to respond and advising them that we would inactivate their memberships if they did not respond. We tried to contact them by mail several times, by email several times and in some cases even by telephone.
On August 31st, we inactivated 2868 non-responding life members. If they contact the office, we will, of course, reactivate their memberships.
This is the second time the office has contacted life members to verify their continuing interest in US Chess. The first time we took several thousand non-responding life members and set them to ‘no magazine’ status. This time we went a step further and removed them from the life membership counts.
Thanks, and glad I asked. I will give him the US Chess office number and ask him to speak to the membership department. I bet they will want to update his address, etc. I want to be able to rate my tournament right away on Saturday.
If a life member marked “inactive” returns to tournament play, and nobody notifies the office in advance of this reincarnation, and the TD submits a rating report with this player in it, then –
Bill Smythe
It has to be removed manually by the office. Having an ‘inactive’ player in an event will cause it to fail validation.
The life members who were inactivated were all ones that had not played in a rated game in at least 5 years, among other things.
Is “inactive” sufficient to cancel any LML attributable to them, to be reinstated if they reinstate? Is this done?
I don’t know what you mean by LML?
They’re still classified as life members, just coded as ‘inactive’ instead of 'active. (Other status codes include ‘duplicate’ and ‘deceased’.)
It is logical to think that if we have removed these people from the life members count that we might also reduce the liability for providing services to life members. I think the question is whether we are actually doing that.
If by LML you mean Life Member Liabilities, I think we don’t currently carry a value for that on the balance sheet or in the notes for the audited financials other than the deferred/unrecognized portion of any life or sustaining member payments, which I believe are recognized over a 20 year period. That may be a question for someone like Allen Priest to answer.
However, if an actuarial study were to be done, inactive life members would most likely be excluded from the analysis, just like deceased life members are. There are some life memberships from before 1984 that we don’t have birthdates for, somewhere around 15% of them I think.
Most of the members who were inactivated were ones that were already not receiving Chess Life, so there wasn’t much impact on the budget.
I thought perhaps the 20 year period was accelerated upon termination.
To Mulfish…it’s not necessarily clear that inactive is sufficient although a termination would be so. May not matter anyway…
I think whatever accounting they do is done in aggregate, rather than by looking at individual life members. There is a report that is run for the auditors each year on the number of life members reported as having passed away during the year, as well as on life and sustaining membership payments received, but I don’t know what they do with that information.
About 15 years ago the office gathered all the data they had on when people bought life memberships and that’s what they used to compute the deferred life member payment liability. They only went back 20 years because they didn’t have data on when people had become life members (or how) from further back. Revenue from new sustaining and life memberships have been added to that deferred revenue number and a portion of it is recognized each year.
We’re just about done with processing sustaining members, there’s just one left who hasn’t completed it.
We have been recognizing income from life memberships over a period of 20 years from the date of membership. That is an attempt to approximate the average length of time for a life membership. some will last 2 years and some will last 40. We do it in aggregate. We will not accelerate the revenue recognition in response to making nonresponsive life members inactive.
The best result for us is if all life members who are alive and still interested at all will contact us so that we can re-engage them.
Those marked inactive are folks we have been unable to contact. We clearly do not have a valid address or other point of contact. The social security administration used to allow organizations to cross member lists against their “dead file”. they no longer allow access to that. So we have no way to know when a life member with whom we have no contact is, well, no longer a life member.
I am pretty sure that some we have marked inactive are in fact alive and well, and others are not. As stated above if they are alive and well and want to get reconnected we are happy to do so.
Understood. I gathered from what I read earlier that the non-respondents were removed from the rolls, which I equated to a termination.
Indeed, one of the membership people took care of this within 15 minutes of my emailing her this morning, and he’s playing this Saturday. Good stuff.
Actually - no. The 20 year revenue recognition is an average. So some individuals will drop out earlier than 20 and some will hang on much longer than 20.
Yep - got (later) that it was being done in aggregate.
I just had an (Inactive) Life Member play in my OTB tournament this past weekend (July 18-19, 2020). The system is not allowing me to submit the tournament. I’ve contacted the office two days ago and have had no response from them at all.
This appears to be a conversion issue.
We’ve added a new staff option to override the check for inactive or deceased players in an event. (We do occasionally get rating reports for players after they have passed away, so this is probably something we needed anyway.)
The event in question has had the override flag checked and should now be ready for release, payment and submission by the TD.
Mr. Reed’s event is rated and posted on MSA. I’d be interested to know what precautions were used, this is one of the larger OTB events to be submitted in recent months and was FIDE rated, too.
This report on the event answers a number of questions:
new.uschess.org/news/getting-back-business