More Facts Emerge About Bank-Owned Insurance Policy

A gracious official at Home BancShares Inc. of Conway wrote to set the record straight on two events that Whispers recently noted had coincided: the death in January of Ron Strother, the company president and COO, and the report in the bank’s first-quarter filings that the line-item for “death benefits received” was $1.585 million.

Our thinly veiled speculation that one led to the other apparently is unfounded. As it turns out, Strother, as an employee of the holding company rather than its Centennial Bank, was ineligible for a bank-owned life insurance policy that many banks take out on their top employees.

Those gains, then, were the result of a different, unidentified, employee’s death.

Further, Whispers was told, the gains realized from that policy were not, strictly speaking, counted as income, because the value of the BOLI investment falls with a death benefit payout.