As a plan sponsor, you have a fiduciary duty to hire competent plan providers to handle your 401(k) plan. So as part of that duty, it’s important to identify who these providers are, how you hired them, and why.

Why? Besides it being an exercise of your fiduciary duty, the fact is that I’ve seen on Department of Labor audits of agents asking plan sponsors and their counsel to ask who the plan providers are and what was the process of selecting them. That goes from the third-party administrator to as trivial as the custodian for automatic rollover individual retirement accounts.

So the more you know and can explain, the better off you are.