Quick background, I am an accountant and I was previously an auditor at a CPA firm who worked on benefit plan audits (Mostly 401(k) and Profit Sharing). I have since moved from public to industry and work as an accountant in the general accounting department.
My company is aware of my previous experience so had me reviewing some of the documents for our different retirement plan audits, seems harmless. However this seems to have escalated. They have now tasked me with a lot more responsibilities regarding the plan and the audits which seems odd. I have become the main contact for the audits, am sent the full document requests and am the employee expected to gather the information and relay to the auditors. I am also expected to keep track of the deadlines and make sure i'm reaching out to auditors and submitting whatever is needed. This includes doing the non-discrimination testing and reviewing forms on the servicer website as well as calculating our year end profit sharing contribution for employees.
As a side note, I don't actually have access to the HR or Payroll system so I have to request a large portion of items from the HR and Payroll. In my experience, my contact with the clients was never someone in the accounting department. Once in a while there were certain things needed from the controller and obviously bank statement requests for remittance testing..but the people I worked with were always the HR/Payroll department.
I already have a significant amount of duties for general accounting so this whole extra responsibility seems completely inappropriate. Am I correct about this or no? I do still retain a decent amount of information from auditing but regulations change constantly and without regular review, in a year or two I could be completely uninformed. It also just doesn't seem like it should be my responsibility at all? Has anyone else ever had the main contact be an accounting personnel for all this?
