Retirement Plans
Every plan review starts with the same five questions.
Fees drift, providers change, and fiduciary responsibility stays with you. The Retirement Plan Scorecard is the structured evaluation I run on every plan: five areas, graded, with the reasoning behind each mark and a short list of what to fix first.
The Retirement Plan Scorecard
Five areas, graded A through D
Plan design fit
Eligibility, match formula, vesting, profit sharing, and testing results measured against the company you are today rather than the one you were when the plan was written.
Fees and provider benchmarking
All-in cost broken out by recordkeeper, advisor, and investments, then compared to plans of similar size and complexity. Including the fees participants pay that never appear on an invoice.
Fiduciary process and documentation
Committee structure, meeting minutes, investment policy statement, required notices, and whether the file would hold up if someone asked to see it.
Investment lineup
Menu breadth, share classes, the default investment, and performance against appropriate benchmarks. Whether the lineup is easy for a participant to use badly.
Participation and employee outcomes
Enrollment and deferral rates, who is not participating, and whether the education employees receive is actually changing behavior.
Sample
What you get back.
A single page you can take to your committee. Each area gets a grade, a one-line finding, and a recommendation with an owner and a date attached.
Illustrative example. Grades and findings shown are for demonstration and do not represent any actual plan.
Retirement Plan Scorecard
A – D
A
C
D
B
A
What the process looks like
Week one
Send me the paperwork
Plan document, most recent 5500, fee disclosure, and a participant census. One email, no meetings required.
Week two
I grade the five areas
Benchmarking against comparable plans, with the reasoning written out so you can see how each grade was reached.
Week three
We walk through it together
An hour with you or your committee, ending with a prioritized action list. No obligation to change providers or hire me.
Plan sponsor questions
What sponsors ask first.
Do I have to change providers?
No. Plenty of reviews end with keeping the current recordkeeper and fixing two or three things around it. The scorecard is a diagnosis, not a sales process.
What does the review cost?
There is no cost for the Retirement Plan Scorecard, and no obligation to change providers or to engage KFAS for ongoing services.
How much work is this for my team?
One document request at the start and one hour at the end. Most of what I need already exists in files your provider sends you every year.
We are a small plan. Is this worth it?
Small plans may also develop gaps when plan design, fees, investments, or fiduciary processes have not been reviewed recently. Fiduciary responsibility does not scale down with headcount.