Art of the Qualified Plan Audit

When employer-initiated personnel reductions occur and it reduces the number of plan participants by 20% or more, a partial termination of a qualified plan is deemed to have occurred.

Pursuant to the Form 5500 instructions, plan sponsors must enter the current value as of the beginning and the end of the plan year on the Schedule H: Statement of Net Assets Available for Benefits.

Posted by Maria T. Hurd, CPA As a result of recent changes to the AICPA-approved language for audit reports, unqualified audit opinions will no longer confuse plan sponsors and service providers who associate the word qualified with compliance. New accounting pronouncements have changed the phraseology used to indicate the plan’s financial statements are not materially … Continued

Plans that obtain a valid limited scope certification for the completeness and accuracy of investment information from a regulated financial institution such as a bank, trust company, or insurance company, can instruct their auditors to exclude investment information from the scope of their audit.

Many nonprofits who sponsor ERISA 403(b) plans are not aware that they need an audit, because counting participants involves much more than knowing how many full-time employees the organization has or how many account balances are in the plan.

As discussed in one of our previous blog posts How to stop a non-elective contribution, circumstances and factors often arise that have us wishing that a commitment that we had entered into had an escape clause.

WEBINAR TODAY March 31, 2014: Join Legg Mason for a webinar with Maria T. Hurd, CPA, Director of Retirement Plan Audit Services at Belfint, Lyons & Shuman. Maria will offer insights to help plan sponsors and advisors prepare for a plan audit.

Imagine you come home from school after graduation and you see your mother beaming with a huge smile on her face. She asks to see your diploma (a certificate of completion in this example) and you oblige and move on to show your father the same.

Financial advisors on TV and financial publications in reputable papers and magazines consistently encourage people who participate in an employer-sponsored retirement plan to contribute as much as possible. In many cases…

Despite the relief retirement payroll managers and retirement plan officials may feel from this most recent sprint to the finish, THE RACE IS NOT OVER. Get that second wind and verify that deferral withholdings that employees have trusted you to put in their retirement accounts were actually deposited to the plan, without exception.