Full multi-year data reconciliation
We ingest every payroll register, contribution record, and accrual transaction across your lookback, then rebuild the numbers from the source data instead of trusting summary reports.
A Humareso payroll audit is an independent, data-driven review of every paycheck, deduction, tax, and employer contribution across a multi-year lookback. We reconcile your payroll system against your plan documents, filings, and carrier records to surface missed 401(k) and 403(b) matches, multi-state tax errors, benefit-deduction gaps, and the costly mistakes a system migration leaves behind.
A payroll audit is an independent, line-by-line review of your payroll data over a multi-year period. It reconciles every paycheck, tax withholding, benefit deduction, and employer contribution against your plan documents, tax filings, and carrier records. The goal is simple: prove the numbers are right, find the errors that have compounded silently, and quantify what is owed to or by the organization.
Payroll runs every two weeks for years before anyone reconciles it line by line. By then, small misconfigurations have compounded into real liability. These are the issues our audits surface most often.
Employees contribute to a 401(k) or 403(b), but the match never posts, posts at the wrong rate, or treats Roth and pre-tax contributions differently. Across a two-year lookback this quietly becomes tens of thousands in missed contributions, plus lost earnings.
Remote and relocated employees are coded to the wrong work state, so withholding, unemployment, and paid-leave taxes flow to the wrong jurisdiction. The exposure surfaces at year end as amended returns and penalties.
A move to Dayforce, Paycom, Workday, or Paylocity rarely carries everything cleanly. Match formulas, tax setups, deduction codes, and accruals break in ways that do not show up until much later.
Employee deductions do not reconcile to what the carrier actually received, especially across a plan-year carrier change. Money is withheld but never lands in the right account.
Manual and off-cycle checks skip accrual and deduction logic, and holiday pay is miscategorized. For grant-funded employers this also distorts cost allocation and 2 CFR 200 compliance, the federal grant cost-allocation rules a single audit checks.
What payroll actually does no longer matches the signed plan document, amendments, or collective bargaining agreement, including non-elective contributions and eligibility rules. That becomes a correction-and-disclosure problem if a regulator looks.
We reconcile your actual payroll data, pay run by pay run, against your plan documents, tax filings, and carrier records. Then we hand you a defensible findings report and a clear remediation path, typically in four to six weeks (two to three for a single-issue review). Working against a DOL inquiry or year-end deadline? Ask about the expedited track, with preliminary findings in days.
We ingest every payroll register, contribution record, and accrual transaction across your lookback, then rebuild the numbers from the source data instead of trusting summary reports.
Every finding is tied to specific employees, pay periods, and dollar amounts, documented under the IRS EPCRS and DOL frameworks so your CPA, ERISA counsel, and recordkeeper can certify the formal corrections. We do the forensic data work; your trusted advisors sign off. And we are independent: our findings never prescribe Humareso services as the fix.
Findings are ranked by risk and dollar exposure so you fix what matters first instead of drowning in a flat list of issues.
When contributions were missed, we calculate the correction and lost earnings to the standards regulators expect, the IRS EPCRS correction framework (the IRS program for fixing retirement-plan errors) and DOL guidance, so your recordkeeper, counsel, and auditors can rely on the numbers.
We coordinate the corrections with your payroll team and recordkeeper, calculate the true-up and lost earnings, draft the employee and former-employee correction communications, and document the system config fixes. Remediation coordination is included in the engagement; any optional ongoing payroll work is quoted separately.
We identify the payroll-system misconfigurations behind the errors so they stop recurring once the audit closes.
Anonymized examples drawn from real payroll and retirement-plan engagements. Names withheld; the findings are representative of what we see.
Two years after a system migration, employees contributing to both Roth and pre-tax 403(b) were receiving only one match. A pay-run-level reconciliation across 17,000 contribution records surfaced the parity failure, multi-state withholding errors for remote staff, and holiday-pay miscoding that was distorting grant cost allocation.
Finance leadership · 700-employee nonprofit · multi-state
A rough payroll conversion plus a recordkeeper blackout left missed employer matches and an unsigned plan amendment on the books. We reconciled the match true-up and non-elective contributions employee by employee, calculated lost earnings, and built the correction and former-employee communications. Proof that this is not just an enterprise-scale exercise.
HR & Finance · 80-employee nonprofit · ADP to Paycom
Across a mid-year switch in HSA providers, payroll deductions no longer reconciled to what the carrier received. A focused two-year audit of HSA participants confirmed exactly where employee money had, and had not, landed.
Benefits team · 80-employee employer · HSA carrier change
Want to talk to someone who has been through it? We can connect you with a client at a similar size and scope. References available on request.
Scope drives price, and you get a fixed fee in writing before any work begins. Rough bands so you can budget before you ever talk to us:
A single issue or a small population: an HSA reconciliation, a one-plan match check, or a multi-state withholding review.
Match true-up, non-elective, and lost-earnings calculations for a plan, with correction and communication support.
A full two-year reconciliation of payroll, tax, benefits, and retirement contributions, typically for a 150 to 400 employee employer.
What moves you within a band: employee count, number of states, number of plans, union or CBA complexity, and lookback length. A 200 to 300 person, multi-state employer post-migration typically lands in the $20K to $28K range. Above 400 employees we scope from the data rather than a flat band. In most engagements, the exposure we surface exceeds the cost of the audit. Not sure which fits? The free readiness check returns a scoped estimate, no call required.
Straight answers. No sales pitch.
A payroll audit is an independent, line-by-line review of your payroll data over a multi-year period. It reconciles every paycheck, tax withholding, benefit deduction, and employer contribution against your plan documents, tax filings, and carrier records to find errors, compliance gaps, and money owed to or by the organization.
A retirement-plan audit checks that employee deferrals and employer matching or non-elective contributions were calculated, withheld, and deposited correctly, and that payroll matches the signed plan document. It catches missed matches, wrong match rates, Roth versus pre-tax errors, eligibility mistakes, and contributions that were never deposited, then quantifies the correction and lost earnings.
They are complementary, not redundant. Your annual ERISA audit, performed by your CPA, is a single-year, sampled, financial-statement audit that opines on the plan’s books. This is a multi-year, 100%-of-pay-runs operational review of the payroll engine itself. The day-to-day calculation, deposit, and configuration errors we surface, like a match formula that broke during a system migration, are exactly what a sampled financial-statement audit is not designed to find. Many clients run this precisely because their annual audit came back clean and the money problems were still there.
The most common triggers are a payroll-system migration, a benefits or recordkeeper change, a merger or acquisition, an IRS or DOL notice, a failed nondiscrimination test, a grant or single audit, or a new finance leader who simply wants assurance the numbers are right.
A two-year lookback is standard, which aligns with how most correction programs and plan-related issues are evaluated. We can extend the window when the situation calls for it.
Most audits complete in four to six weeks. A targeted, single-issue review can be done in two to three. What extends the timeline: union or CBA interpretation, multi-state complexity, and how quickly your recordkeeper responds. If you are working against a hard deadline, a DOL inquiry, a December single audit, or a year-end close, tell us and we will scope an expedited track.
Targeted single-issue reviews start around $2,500; a comprehensive two-year audit for a 150 to 400 employee employer typically runs $15,000 to $45,000 (see the pricing bands above). Scope drives price, and we size the engagement to the risk, so a smaller organization is never subsidizing an enterprise-scale audit. You get a fixed scope and fee in writing before any work begins. The fastest way to your number is the free readiness check: tell us your headcount, payroll system, and what is worrying you, and we send a scoped estimate, no call required.
We scope to the risk, so you are not paying for a full two-year audit to rule out a single concern; when the worry is narrow we propose a targeted review or start with a low-cost readiness check. And if the numbers come back clean, you walk away with documented assurance you can hand to a board, a new finance leader, or a fiduciary committee. Either way you know where you stand.
Yes, because of how the work is structured. We are a payroll and HR operations team, not a CPA or law firm, and we do not pretend to be. Our job is the forensic data work: reconciling every pay run and contribution, then documenting each finding to specific employees, pay periods, and dollar amounts under the IRS EPCRS and DOL correction frameworks. Most findings, like a wrong work-state or a missed accrual, are simply corrected in payroll with no outside sign-off needed. Only a formal retirement-plan correction routes through your recordkeeper or ERISA counsel, and those are advisors you already have, not a new hire. We do the heavy reconciliation that makes their job faster and cheaper.
Senior Humareso payroll and HR practitioners who reconcile these exact systems, Dayforce, Paycom, ADP, Paylocity, Workday, and UKG, day in and day out. Not a rotating queue of junior staff. We pair that hands-on system fluency with a disciplined, peer-reviewed reconciliation method, and we hand the documented results to your certifying advisors.
Humareso processes payroll and administers benefits for clients every day, so handling sensitive employee, tax, and retirement-plan data under contract is core to how we operate. For an audit specifically: data moves over secure transfer, never email; access is limited to the engagement team on a need-to-know basis; we delete working copies when the engagement closes; and we sign your NDA or data-processing agreement before anything is shared.
A severity-ranked findings report tied to specific employees, pay periods, and dollar amounts, with documented methodology, recommended corrections including lost-earnings calculations, and the system and process fixes that prevent the errors from recurring. We also help coordinate remediation.
The lift on your side is light: you give us access to or exports of your payroll, contribution, and accrual data through a secure channel, then answer occasional questions. We do the reconciliation, contact the recordkeeper and carriers where needed, and draft the employee and former-employee correction communications. Most corrections are made right in your payroll system by your existing team or vendor at no added cost; we can execute them too, quoted separately. And the true-up dollars themselves are owed to your employees and the plan, not to us. Either way the findings tell everyone exactly what to change.
Start with a free, no-obligation readiness check, or a 15-minute call about your payroll, retirement plan, or benefits reconciliation. No pitch, just an honest read on where you may be exposed, and a fixed scope and fee before any work begins.
The readiness check returns a scoped fee estimate by email within two business days. No call, no sales sequence, no follow-up unless you ask. Prefer to talk now? The 15-minute call is there if a deadline can’t wait.