A Department of Labor health-plan investigation moves on the agency's clock, not the employer's. The opening correspondence typically allows fourteen days for an initial response. The on-site interview — when one is scheduled — follows on a timeline that the agency, not the employer, sets. The thirty days an investigation gives a plan sponsor to prepare are not, in practice, thirty days. They are the days the sponsor has already spent preparing before the letter arrives, plus whatever days remain to organize what already exists.

The checklist below is the one we use with clients who have engaged us for audit-readiness work in advance of any specific inquiry. It is structured by what an employer should have assembled, not by what an employer should have done; the doing is the easier part, and is rarely the source of the exposure.

Days 1–7: the document set

  1. Current wrap document and all amendments. The wrap document defines the plan as a legal entity. If the version on file does not match the version currently operating, the gap is the first thing an investigator will identify.
  2. Summary Plan Description for each component benefit, in the version distributed to participants. The participant copy — not the consultant's master file — is what the investigator will ask for.
  3. All Form 5500 filings for the last three plan years, with attached schedules. Together with the wrap document, this is the record on which every other question will be tested.
  4. Carrier contracts, broker compensation agreements, and any third-party administrator agreements in effect during the period under review.

Days 8–14: the participant record

  1. Enrollment data for the period under review, in a format that can be reconciled against participant counts on Schedule A. A variance of more than a few percent is one of the first patterns investigators look for.
  2. Eligibility administration records — the operational evidence that the eligibility rules in the SPD have actually been applied. Open-enrollment communications, eligibility determinations, and any waiver or denial documentation.
  3. COBRA administration records, including the notice templates, the operational mailings, and the contractor agreement if a third party is performing the function.
  4. Claims-procedure documentation, including the procedure described in the SPD and the operational evidence that it has been followed.

Days 15–21: the fiduciary file

  1. Plan-committee minutes, charter, and roster. If a formal committee exists, the file should show meetings on a recurring schedule and discussion of the questions a fiduciary would reasonably consider. If no committee exists, the file should show how those questions are otherwise being answered.
  2. Service-provider review documentation — the analysis behind each carrier, broker, and administrator engagement. A fiduciary file that contains only contracts, with no analytical record, is the file investigators read most carefully.
  3. Fee disclosures received under ERISA §408(b)(2) and the sponsor's review of them.

Days 22–30: the response posture

The final ten days are not about adding to the file. They are about organizing what is in it for the format the investigators request — which is the format they have requested in every prior matter and which is well documented in practitioner literature. They are also about identifying, in advance, the questions for which the file will not produce a clean answer. Every investigation surfaces at least one. The employer's posture toward those questions is what distinguishes a matter that closes without findings from one that does not.

The employer who has identified the difficult questions in advance is in a different posture than the one who learns of them during the on-site interview. The thirty days are for that identification, not for invention.

None of the items above are unusual. A plan sponsor who is operating a competent welfare-plan program already has most of this material somewhere; the cost of the thirty days is the cost of locating it, organizing it, and reconciling the inconsistencies that the organization itself surfaces. An investigation that arrives without that preparation has already begun on terms the employer would not have chosen.

Drawn from Cherry Park's audit-readiness engagements. The checklist describes the operational record an employer should have assembled; it does not constitute legal advice, and specific investigations should be coordinated with ERISA counsel. Employers anticipating or facing inquiry are invited to request a confidential plan review.