Accountant's audit needed? Brother-sister group of more than 100 emplo

[Guest Don J. Smith]

I have two sales companies that constitute a Control Group. Each company sells the same product but different brands than the other. Each company has it's own Standardized Prototype 401(k) Plan Document that is a clone of the other. The one company has 85 employees other has 50 employees. Must the plans be audited?

[Guest LeAnn Rudolph]

Since you have two separate plans - each requiring a form 5500 to be filed, audits would not be required as the number of eligible participants is below 100 for each plan.

[PMC]

This wasn't the specific question but 2 companies within a controlled group each maintaining a "Standardized" Prototype?

[lkpittman]

I agree with LeAnn. We have a similar situation with an affiliated service group where partners participate in one plan and ees participate in another (the plans are identical and the two plans are aggregated for nondiscrimination, etc.). We still have an audit requirement for the ee plan, because we've got more than 100 ees, but no audit requirement for the partner plan, because there are less than 100 partners. This helps--partner plan assets are much higher in value and some assetsn are very "interesting" (for those that are self-directing), but we've eliminated the burden of the audit for the more burdensome plan.