Art of the Qualified Plan Audit

As a plan sponsor, you may know that, generally, if your plan covers 100 employees or more, your plan is considered a large plan and requires audited financial statements to be attached to the 5500 filing.

As auditors, we are required to review the controls in place at a plan sponsor of a retirement plan and its service providers to assess the risk of material misstatement resulting from control risk. In doing so, we constantly evaluate the adequacy of the control structure and recommend improvements to strengthen the processes to prevent errors.

Discrimination. It’s a concept that most people don’t associate with retirement plan savings.

The use of the wrong definition of compensation is the most common error found in employee benefit plan audits, and it can be a very costly mistake to correct in accordance with the provisions of the IRS’ Employee Plan Compliance Resolution System (EPCRS).

We often ask the question, “How does our 401(k) plan stack up?”

Plan administrators probably view the management representation letter as a document they must sign so they likely do so without reading it closely.

Along with the presidential election on Tuesday, November 8, another election that participants should have on their mind is the deferral for their retirement plan.

On April 6, 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued its final rule expanding the definition of investment advice fiduciary under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and modifying the complex list of prohibited transaction exemptions as it relates to the expanded definition.

In the retirement plan industry, 2 + 2 can be 4, or many other amounts depending on the actuarial assumptions used. Similarly, one-participant plans can actually cover hundreds of participants.

Posted by Maria T. Hurd, CPA Disclaimer: All blog posts are valid as of the date published. In a highly regulated industry with complicated rules that always have exceptions (except when the exception does not apply) it is inevitable that sooner or later a failure to follow the plan document will take place. Such operational … Continued