Reference

Glossary and flags

Definitions for every field the app surfaces, the ERISA vocabulary behind it, and the full catalog of retirement and welfare prospect flags with the conditions that trip them.

ERISA primer

Core concepts

ERISA	Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. The federal law that defines fiduciary duties, reporting, and disclosure obligations for most private-sector retirement and welfare plans.
Form 5500	The annual report every ERISA plan files with the Department of Labor. Includes financial statements, participant counts, service-provider compensation, and plan-feature codes. Public record once the DOL publishes it.
Schedule H	Financial information schedule filed by large retirement plans (100+ participants). Source of admin expense, investment return, and asset-allocation breakouts.
Schedule I	Short-form financial schedule filed by small retirement plans. Does not include asset-allocation slices or admin-expense percent, so those fields show a dash for Schedule-I-only filers.
Schedule SB / MB	Defined-benefit actuarial schedules. Schedule SB for single-employer DB plans, Schedule MB for multiemployer. Source of funded status, funding target, effective interest rate, and zone status.
Schedule G	Financial transaction schedule. Part III lists party-in-interest transactions during the plan year - self-dealing, related-party loans, prohibited-transaction starting points.
Schedule R	Retirement plan information schedule. Source of safe-harbor design indicator, distribution counts, and funding deficiency markers.
Schedule A	Insurance-contract information for welfare plans (and retirement plans with insurance arrangements). One row per contract, with premium received, premium earned, and total charges paid for the year.
Schedule A Part 1	Broker and consultant rows on Schedule A. Each row carries the broker name, address, commissions, fees, and total compensation for the year.
Schedule C	Service-provider compensation. Source of the Service providers table on retirement plan pages and the TPAs table on welfare plan pages. Direct compensation only; indirect comp is disclosed in the filing PDF.
Top Hat statement	Employer statement filed under DOL section 2520.104-23 declaring an unfunded deferred-compensation plan for a select group of management or highly compensated employees. Surfaces deferred-comp depth on the plan page; sponsor email is tier-gated.
EIN	Employer Identification Number. Nine digits, assigned by the IRS, unique per legal entity. Plans are keyed by EIN + plan number.
Plan number	Three-digit number the sponsor assigns per plan. Stored as text with leading zeros. A 401(k) is commonly 002 or 003 at many sponsors; 001 is often a DB plan; welfare plans typically start at 501.
Filing ACK ID	The DOL acknowledgement ID for a specific filing submission. Each filed year has its own ACK ID. Old URLs using /retirement/<ack-id> redirect 301 to the canonical /retirement/<ein>-<plannum> slug.
NAICS code	North American Industry Classification System. The two-digit sector code used as a peer-grouping dimension and as a filter on /retirement and /welfare. Sponsor industry is enriched from PDL when the filing left the field blank.
DC vs DB	Defined-contribution plans (401(k), 403(b), profit-sharing) put the investment risk on the participant. Defined-benefit plans promise a specified retirement benefit and keep the risk on the employer. Both are in scope.
Funding type	Welfare plan funding classification: fully insured (premium paid to a carrier), self-funded (employer pays claims directly), mixed (both), MEWA (Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangement), or unknown when the indicators don't resolve.
MEWA	Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangement. A welfare plan covering employees of two or more unrelated employers. Read directly from the type-of-plan-entity code on the 5500 face.
Stop-loss	Insurance carrier that caps a self-funded employer's exposure to large individual or aggregate claims. Self-funded plans without a stop-loss carrier are running uninsured catastrophic risk - one of the welfare prospect flags.

Money fields

Retirement: financial fields

Total assets (EOY)	Plan net assets at the end of the plan year. Drives the most visible numbers on the page (summary tile, sparklines, asset-growth percent).
Total assets (BOY)	Plan net assets at the start of the plan year. Equals prior-year EOY if filings are continuous.
Asset growth	Signed percent change from BOY to EOY. Combines contributions, investment return, and distributions - a single headline number for how the plan moved this year.
Annual return	Plan-level return on assets. Computed from filed investment income divided by average assets. Scale is 0-100; negative means the plan lost money on investments.
Employer contributions	Dollars the sponsor contributed this plan year. Includes match, non-elective, profit-sharing, and safe-harbor dollars.
Participant contributions	Dollars participants deferred into the plan this year. 401(k) salary deferrals, 403(b) elective deferrals, after-tax/Roth deferrals.
Admin expense	Plan-administrative expenses paid from plan assets. Shown as a percent of assets on the summary tile and as a dollar figure on the expenses panel.
Admin fee per account holder	Admin expense divided by participants with an account balance (Form 5500 line 6g). Admin fees are paid out of plan assets and allocated pro-rata across account balances, so per-account-holder is the meaningful 'what does a participant actually pay' number.
Fidelity bond	ERISA Section 412 requires most plans to carry a bond against loss from fraud or dishonesty by anyone handling plan funds. Minimum coverage is 10% of funds handled, capped at $500,000 (or $1,000,000 for plans with employer securities).
Average account balance	Total assets divided by participants with an account balance (Form 5500 line 6g). The true average balance for participants who actually hold money in the plan.
Funded status (DB)	Plan assets divided by funding target. Below 80% is the underfunded threshold; below 60% triggers benefit-restriction rules under PPA.

Headcount fields

Retirement: participant fields

Form 5500 distinguishes between several participant populations. The distinction matters: participation rate uses one denominator, total participants uses another.

Eligible employees	Workers the sponsor reports as eligible to participate in the plan. Used as the denominator for participation rate. Form 5500 line 6a.
Active participants	Workers currently covered by the plan and eligible to defer (whether or not they actually are).
Total participants	Active participants plus retired-with-balance plus separated-with-balance. The top-line count. Form 5500 line 6f.
Retired-with-balance	Former workers who retired but still have a vested balance in the plan. Rising counts can signal rollover opportunity.
Participation rate	Active participants divided by eligible employees. On a 0-100 scale. Below 70% trips the auto-enroll opportunity flag.
Vested participant	Participant with a non-forfeitable right to their employer contributions. Schedule varies by plan; most plans are fully vested within six years.

Welfare-side fields

Welfare: premium and broker fields

Total premiums	Carrier-paid premium for the plan year, summed across every Schedule A contract. We surface the highest of premium received, premium earned, and total charges paid per row, so the figure reflects the carrier's actual receipts. Read as plan-paid carrier spend.
Premium per covered life	Total premiums divided by persons covered. The headline normalized cost figure on welfare plan pages.
Persons covered	Total persons covered at the start of the plan year. Form 5500 face. Includes employees, dependents, and beneficiaries.
Broker compensation	Sum of commissions, fees, and other compensation reported on Schedule A Part 1 across every broker on the plan. Surfaces both as a dollar figure and as a percent of total premium.
Retention	Schedule A retention figure - the carrier's administrative overhead, fees, and risk margin built into the contract. Total charges paid minus premium earned approximates retention when reported separately.
Policy term	Schedule A policy_from_date and policy_to_date. The renewal calendar surfaces contracts approaching their policy_to_date - the prospecting window for a re-shop.
Carrier key	Canonical id for an insurance carrier across spelling variants and parent/subsidiary tags. Used by the welfare filter rail (carriers panel) and as the identifier on /welfare/carrier/[id].
Broker key	Canonical id for a broker across spelling variants. Used by the welfare filter rail (brokers panel) and as the identifier on /welfare/broker/[id].

Benchmark math

Peer cohorts and percentile math

Peer groups are cohorts of plans that share structural attributes. Retirement cohorts are defined by NAICS sector, asset band, and plan-type bucket. Welfare cohorts run through a four-tier ladder: exact (NAICS-2 + funding type + size bucket + state), funding (NAICS-2 + funding type + size bucket), NAICS (NAICS-2 + size bucket), national (plan year only). The most specific cohort with at least five peers wins.

For each metric, every plan in the cohort is sorted and mapped to a 0-100 percentile. Higher always means better. For fees and cash drag, the raw metric is inverted before ranking so that a 90th-percentile admin-expense rank means the plan pays less than 90% of its peers.

On retirement plan pages, six percentiles combine - participation, return, fees, match generosity, asset growth, cash drag - into the single plan-rank percentile on the summary band.

All 17

Retirement prospect flags

Every retirement plan-year is scored against 17 flags. Six are DOL-deterministic (read from indicator boxes on the filing). Six are absolute-cutoff (size- and industry-independent thresholds). Four are peer-cohort percentile(bottom-quintile within the plan's cohort). One is the derived wind-down flag.

Flags reflect the filing as filed - they do not capture subsequent corrective action. A flag stays tripped for that year even if the sponsor cured the issue the next year.

DOL-deterministic (red)

Insufficient fidelity bondFLAG_FIDELITY_BOND: Reported bond coverage is less than 10% of funds handled - the ERISA Section 412 minimum.
Failed to transmit contributionsFLAG_FAIL_TRANSMIT_CONTRIBUTIONS: Sponsor reported employee contributions were not transmitted to the trust within the DOL-required window. A prohibited transaction.
Failed to provide a benefitFLAG_FAILED_PROVIDE_BENEFIT: Plan failed to provide a benefit that was due during the year. Rare but unambiguous ERISA breach.
Corrective distributionsFLAG_CORRECTIVE_DISTRIBUTIONS: Plan refunded excess contributions that failed ADP/ACP nondiscrimination testing. Indicates a top-heavy or skew-to-HCEs problem.
Loss from fraud or dishonestyFLAG_LOSS_DISCOVERED: Plan reported a loss from fraud or dishonesty during the year. Filed on Schedule H, Part III.
Recently terminatedFLAG_RECENTLY_TERMINATED: Plan filed a final return (termination amendment). Rollover and merger opportunity.

Absolute-cutoff (amber)

High retiree concentrationFLAG_RETIREE_PERCENTAGE: Retired-with-balance / total participants >= 25%. Often precedes rollover waves.
High admin expense per account holderFLAG_ADMIN_PER_P: Administrative expenses exceed $300 per account holder per year. Recordkeeping / audit / legal only; excludes investment management.
High cash allocationFLAG_CASH_PERCENTAGE: More than 10% of EOY assets are held in cash. Possible menu-design or default-fund problem.
Low participation rateFLAG_PARTICIPATION_RATE: Active / eligible below 70%. Below the auto-enroll industry norm.
High average balanceFLAG_HIGH_ASSETS: Average balance per participant exceeds $250,000. Top-decile high-value plan.
Crossed 100 participantsFLAG_REACHED_100: Account-balance holders crossed the 100-participant threshold this year. Triggers the SECURE 2.0 large-plan audit requirement and Schedule H filing.

Peer-cohort percentile (amber)

Low annual returnFLAG_RETURN_PERCENTAGE: Plan return sits in the bottom quintile of its peer cohort (NAICS x size x plan type) for the year.
Low average balanceFLAG_ASSETS_PER_PARTICIPANT: Average balance per participant sits in the bottom quintile of the peer cohort. Savings-rate or match opportunity.
Low employer contributionsFLAG_LOW_EMPLOYER_CONTRIB: Employer contributions per participant are in the bottom quintile of the peer cohort. Match generosity gap.
Low participant contributionsFLAG_LOW_PARTICIPANT_CONTRIB: Participant contributions per participant are in the bottom quintile of the peer cohort.

Derived (grey)

Wind-down or frozen planFLAG_WIND_DOWN: Plan appears closed to new enrollment: account-balance holders far exceed active employees, or the plan reports active distributions with no inflows, or the plan filed a final return, or lifecycle is frozen/terminating. Participation rates on these plans are misleading; benchmark cohorts exclude them.

All 12

Welfare prospect flags

Every welfare plan-year is scored against twelve opportunity flags, each tripped against a single named cutoff or a peer-cohort comparison. Cohort selection uses the four-tier ladder described above (exact, funding-matched, NAICS, national).

Welfare opportunity signals

Premium spikeFLAG_PREMIUM_SPIKE: Year-over-year premium percent change above 20%. Renewal shock.
Carrier switchFLAG_CARRIER_SWITCH: The largest-premium carrier on the plan changed since the prior filing.
Broker switchFLAG_BROKER_SWITCH: The largest-comp broker on the plan changed since the prior filing.
High broker compensationFLAG_HIGH_BROKER_COMP_PCT: Total broker compensation exceeds 5% of total premium.
UnderbrokerFLAG_UNDERBROKER: Premium over $1M with broker compensation under 1% of premium. Often a captive or in-house arrangement.
Carrier concentration riskFLAG_CONCENTRATION_RISK: Top carrier holds more than 85% of total premium on the plan.
Premium per life outlierFLAG_PREMIUM_PER_P_OUTLIER: Premium per covered life sits in the top quintile of the peer cohort.
No brokerFLAG_NO_BROKER: Plan reports premium but no broker on Schedule A Part 1.
Self-funded, no stop-lossFLAG_SELF_FUNDED_NO_STOPLOSS: Plan is self-funded with no stop-loss carrier on file. Uninsured catastrophic-claim exposure.
MEWAFLAG_MEWA: Plan is filed as a Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangement.
Recently terminatedFLAG_RECENTLY_TERMINATED: Final filing indicator on the most recent year.
Funding transitionFLAG_FUNDING_TRANSITION: Funding type changed from prior filing (e.g. fully insured to self-funded). Often signals a stop-loss or admin-services-only opportunity.