The Auditing Standards Board created a special task force in 2015 to consider a proposal to improve the quality of employee benefit plan audits by strengthening the EBP auditors’ report.
Some of my most memorable childhood stories were those of Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish.
It is not often that we can give our clients good news as a result of new guidance from the Internal Revenue Service, but thanks to Notice 2016-16, Mid-Year Changes to Safe Harbor Plans and Safe Harbor Notices, we have fantastic news.
In May 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefit Security Administration (EBSA) published the results of its assessment of the quality of retirement plan audits.
When an auditor is considering accepting an engagement to audit financial statements and/or after a new auditor has been engaged to audit financial statements that have been audited by another firm in previous years,
In my previous blog, “The Voluntary Fiduciary Correction Program – Overview”, I discussed the Voluntary Fiduciary Correction Program (VFCP).
By filing through the VFCP, a plan sponsor will receive a no-action letter from the EBSA indicating to the plan that the EBSA will not take civil action against the plan sponsor with regard to this specific transaction in the submission. It is also important to note that there is no application fee to file through the VFCP.
The Department of Labor (DOL) released its report on employee benefit plan audits (Assessing the Quality of Employee Benefit Plan Audits) on May 28, 2015. As I discussed in my last blog, DOL Audit Quality Study: Employee Benefit Plan Auditors Are not Making the Grade, the report is not favorable to auditors. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants is making an effort to address these quality issues through its Enhancing Audit Quality initiative.
At last week’s American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Employee Benefit Plan (EBP) Conference, the Department of Labor (DOL) compared auditing retirement plans to brain surgery. The analogy was meant to indicate that a patient would not seek out a general practitioner to perform brain surgery, due to the highly complex nature of the service and the lack of experience the general medical practitioner would have at performing the service.
Whether it is when we are growing up, in school, or in our careers, we tend to gravitate towards those who are most like us and form groups.