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Winning Back-Office Strategies to Boost Your Business Agility
VIEWpoint Issue 1 | 2023
2023 Compliance Trends: Staying Ahead in an Evolving Regulatory E...
If your company sponsored a retirement plan in 2011, don’t be surprised if you receive a letter from the Department of Labor (DOL) this September indicating your plan has been selected as part of an audit quality study. Don’t panic – this is not an audit of the plan to identify weaknesses or problems with the plan; rather, it is to assess the quality of audits performed by your independent auditor of the plan.
Selecting 400 retirement plans across the nation, the Office of the Chief Accountant (OCA) of the DOL’s Employee Benefit Security Administration will perform a statistical assessment related to the quality of work by independent auditors of ERISA plans to complete their survey. With more than 7,000 CPA firms performing more than 83,000 ERISA audits in the 2011 plan filing year, the odds of your plan being chosen is slim. It is expected that nearly 200 of the audits selected for review will have been performed by CPA firms with minimal ERISA audits. Serving as the auditor of hundreds of ERISA plans, Doeren Mayhew clients’ chances of being selected are meek.
What to Do if Your Plan Gets a Quality Audit
If you are one of the “lucky” plans chosen as part of this survey, you should:
After this point, your independent auditors will be responsible to provide access to your 2011 audit workpapers to the DOL for review, which will complete the process. The DOL does not anticipate needing to be on site at the plan sponsor’s location for any reason. Remember, this is not a DOL investigation or enforcement effort, so there are no repercussions of this review.
If you’re a Doeren Mayhew client who received a letter stating your employee benefit plan has been selected, contact our auditors in Michigan, Houston or Ft. Lauderdale to assist you through the process.
This publication is distributed for informational purposes only, with the understanding that Doeren Mayhew is not rendering legal, accounting, or other professional opinions on specific facts for matters, and, accordingly, assumes no liability whatsoever in connection with its use. Should the reader have any questions regarding any of the news articles, it is recommended that a Doeren Mayhew representative be contacted.
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