Art of the Qualified Plan Audit

State or local governments and organizations that are tax-exempt under IRC Section 501(c) can establish a 457(b) plan to allow their employees to defer income taxation on retirement savings, similar to how the more popular 401(k) plans operate, but with some important differences, including the availability of hardship distributions.

If your company offers a self-insured health and welfare plan, a HRA, or a FSA, your company must pay a fee per covered person by July 31, 2014 on Form 720.

Imagine that I am standing over a hunched plan administrator in a dark room with a single bright light shone on them screaming “did you take money from the plan?!?”

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.