PAXEMONT

RETIREMENT PLAN AUDIT INTELLIGENCE

Condo managers in France →France →

Fewer accounting firms sign a retirement plan audit every year. The plans do not go away.

Every plan large enough to need an audit files a public report each year and names the accountant who signed it. Paxemont reads those filings and writes a short market brief for one firm at a time.

Accounting firms signing at least one U.S. retirement plan audit

20165,946
20243,303

Counted by employer identification number, from the filings themselves. Firms leave this work through retirement, merger, or a decision to stop — and every plan they leave behind still needs an audit next year.

What a brief contains

Plans in the firm's own postal areas that report no accountant. Sponsors nearby who changed accountant and wrote down why, in their own words. How the firm's own book of audits has moved over the past six years, against the rest of its state. Fee ranges by plan size, where plans report one.

See an example brief

What the database covers

Filings7.4 million plan filings, plan years 2016 through 2024
GeographyAll fifty states and the District of Columbia
Accounting firms3,307 signed at least one plan audit for 2024
Stated reasons38,350 sponsor explanations for changing a provider

Every figure above is a count of records, not an estimate.

Where the numbers come from

Every U.S. retirement plan with roughly a hundred or more participants files a Form 5500 with the Department of Labor each year. Plans that must be audited attach a schedule carrying the accountant's name, employer identification number, and opinion code. A separate schedule records providers the sponsor let go, in the sponsor's own words:

ACCOUNTANT_FIRM_NAME
the firm that signed the audit
ACCOUNTANT_FIRM_EIN
its employer identification number
ACCTNT_OPINION_TYPE_CD
whether the opinion was qualified
PROVIDER_TERM_TEXT
why a provider was let go

Field names as published in the Department of Labor's data sets.

Firms are identified by employer identification number rather than by name, so a firm that changes how it writes its name is still counted as the same firm. Every figure in a brief traces back to a filing anyone can look up. Nothing is bought from a data broker, nothing is scraped, and no client information of any kind is used.

Names of partners come from one other public source: the membership list the AICPA's Employee Benefit Plan Audit Quality Center publishes for its member firms. That is how a brief is addressed to the right person rather than to an inbox.

Because the filings are public, nothing in a brief is exclusive. What it saves is the reading.

Also from Paxemont: condominium managers in France

A separate service, in French, for syndics de copropriété — the firms that manage residential buildings in France. It reads the national register of condominiums kept by the Anah and lists, for one firm at a time, the buildings near its own that no longer have a declared manager.

Visit the French page