The opening letter from a Department of Labor health-plan investigator is a short document. It is also a misleadingly polite one. The letter requests a meeting at the employer's office on a specific date several weeks out, attaches a list of documents to be produced in advance, and offers a phone number for the employer to call with any questions. The fourteen days commonly cited as the response window are not, in any meaningful sense, the time the employer has. They are the time the employer has to produce a document set that the agency expects to receive, in a format the agency expects to read, before the meeting that the letter is announcing rather than proposing.

What the letter asks for

The document request is largely standardized. The employer will be asked for the current wrap document and amendments, the Summary Plan Descriptions for each component benefit, the Form 5500 filings for the three most recent plan years, carrier and broker agreements in effect during the period, eligibility and enrollment records, and the COBRA administration record. The request is comprehensive but not exotic. Each item is something a competently administered welfare plan already has somewhere.

"Somewhere" is the operative word. The fourteen days do not produce the items. They locate them, organize them, and reconcile them against one another. An employer who has the items in a single location and in a coherent format is in a different posture than one who is locating them for the first time — and the agency will know which is which by the format in which the response arrives.

What the letter implies

Three implications are worth attention.

The first is that the investigator has reviewed the most recent Form 5500 before sending the letter. The document request is calibrated to the filing. An employer reading the letter without re-reading the filing is at an information disadvantage that the document set alone will not correct.

The second is that the meeting is not a question-and-answer session. It is a structured walk-through of the document set with the people who maintain it. The employer who arrives with the people who can answer operational questions about eligibility, enrollment, and claims administration is in a different posture than the one who arrives with general counsel and a benefits manager who needs to refer questions out.

The third is that the agency has, in nearly all cases, decided what it wants to look at before the meeting. The questions at the meeting will reveal the analytical posture. The document set submitted in advance will determine what questions get asked.

The fourteen days are not the days the agency has given the employer to respond. They are the days the agency has given itself to read the response before the meeting.

How fourteen days disappear

The fourteen days disappear in four predictable places.

  1. Days one and two are usually consumed by counsel coordination. The decisions about how to scope the response, who at the employer will own the production, and whether outside counsel will lead the engagement are not decisions that can be made in an hour.
  2. Days three through six are document gathering. The wrap document, the SPDs, and the Form 5500s are easy. The carrier agreements, broker agreements, eligibility records, and COBRA administration records are not. The records exist; they live in different systems, under different ownership.
  3. Days seven through ten are reconciliation. What the documents say should be the same as what the filings show. They are not always. The reconciliation work — and the documentation of any inconsistencies — is the work that determines the posture of the response.
  4. Days eleven through fourteen are formatting and delivery. The response should be submitted in the format the agency expects, on the timeline the letter specifies, with a transmittal cover that organizes the production for a reader who has not seen the file before.

The employer who has not done audit-readiness work in advance compresses all four phases into the fourteen-day window. The employer who has done the work has done most of phases two and three already. The phases that remain — coordination and delivery — are what fourteen days are actually for.

A field note from the practice. Cherry Park works with plan sponsors and counsel on DOL examinations, audit-readiness preparation, and post-letter response coordination. Employers who have received an opening letter, or who anticipate one, are invited to request a confidential plan review.