The Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies along with the recent mutual fund scandals have shaken investors’ confidence in their 401(k) and other retirement plans. As a result, the Department of Labor, IRS, and legal system are in the process of making significant revisions to the audit requirements for these plans, many of which are due to Sarbanes-Oxley, also known as Section 404 attestation. These requirements are bound to have an effect on you, the administrator or trustee of your Employee Benefit plan. As a result, relying on a generalist to perform the highly technical work of a 401(k) audit has just become riskier.

In a recent survey performed by a major financial institution, respondents had the following negative feedback regarding the accounting firms doing their retirement plan audits:

• We seem to have a new retirement plan auditor every year

• We try to anticipate what the auditor wants, but every year it seems like something new is requested

• The auditor and the investment firm don’t seem to work together costing us time and interruption

• Our 401(k) audit doesn't seem to be a priority

• Why can't this process be simpler?

WE AGREE!

OUR APPROACH

Our goal is to make your retirement plan audit experience easier and less costly without sacrificing quality. We offer a rigorous and efficient approach to performing Employee Benefit Plan audits using streamlined procedures and checklists. We also have more interaction with your third party administrator at the front end greatly reducing your involvement in the tedious and time-consuming portions of the audit. Bottom line, we know that you want a simple, clean 401(k) audit and we have put the procedures in place to ensure that it happens.

We make every effort to obtain most of documents required for the audit and spend significant time prior to visiting your office(s), all with the goal of minimizing your valuable time.  Typically our field work takes from one to two days, rather than the week or two you may have experienced in the past. 

Our FIXED pricing approach is based on extensive experience in knowing how much effort is required and with rare exceptions, remains the same as the initial quotation.  Additionally, you will find that our pricing is as much as 50% less than major national firms.  As deemed appropriate, we also offer multi-year engagement agreements, thereby retaining the same pricing for those years covered.