Roughly 76,000 US retirement plans file an audited Form 5500 each year, and every one of them names the accounting firm that signed it. That record shows which firms hold which plans, which relationships have moved, and when. I turn it into something a practice leader can act on.
Measured across 146,311 year-over-year pairs of large-plan filings. About one plan in eleven. Audit relationships are far stickier than most practice plans assume.
Nearly a third of accountant-EIN changes are the same firm under a new number: a rename, a restructuring, or a filer correcting a typo. Counted naively, turnover looks half again as high as it is.
Between form years 2022 and 2023, when only participants with account balances counted toward the audit threshold. Most of those sponsors did not shrink and did not change firms. Read as lost clients, they mislead badly.
Every audited plan in a defined territory whose auditor has changed hands or is in transition. Named, with sponsor EIN, plan number, participants with account balances, plan assets, and a year-by-year record of who signed each audit. Ranked by which sit closest to a decision. One-time price, delivered as a document and a spreadsheet.
The complete plan audit book of any accounting firm in the country: what it holds, what it has gained, what it has lost, and to whom. Useful before a merger, during diligence, or when a competitor moves into your market.
Form 5500 data runs about eighteen months behind, so an auditor change becomes public long after it happens. Standing monitoring of a named set of plans, reporting each filing as it lands rather than when someone thinks to look.
If it is in the filings, it can be built. Fee benchmarking, first-audit candidates approaching the threshold, sector concentration, sponsor changes. Ask.
Every figure I deliver traces to a specific Form 5500 filed with the Department of Labor and published through EFAST2. Nothing is modeled, estimated, or bought from a list broker. If a number is in one of my documents, you can pull the filing behind it yourself.
Relationships are matched on the accountant EIN reported in Schedule H rather than on firm name, so a firm that renamed itself rolls up correctly instead of appearing as a lost client. Where the filings cannot support a claim, my documents say so rather than fill the gap. Being able to tell the difference is most of the work.
Tell me the firm, the territory, or the question. If the filings can answer it, I will tell you what it takes and what it costs. If they cannot, I will tell you that instead.