Almost every recordkeeper has a read-only auditor role. Almost every first-time sponsor shares their own login instead, because nobody told them the role existed.
A plan year of payroll registers holds names, dates of birth and often full Social Security numbers for your entire workforce. How those files move matters as much as who sees them.
Maintained by the audit team at Ledgerline. Vendor neutral by policy: we never rank or recommend ourselves here.
It gives the auditor transactional authority nobody intended, and it destroys the record of who did what, which is awkward in an engagement whose entire purpose is establishing who did what. Use the auditor role.
An auditor needs plan-level reporting and the participant detail behind it. They do not need to transact, change elections, or add users. If the only role available grants more, raise it with the recordkeeper rather than working around it.
Auditor accounts are granted in February and forgotten in September. Put the removal on the same checklist as the opinion, or you accumulate standing access for people who left the firm years ago.
Most recordkeepers provide one. Where they do not, agree a method with the auditor before the first file moves. Census and payroll files are the most sensitive data your organisation holds about its own people.
Two facts per recordkeeper: how the plan administrator grants auditor access, and how documents are supposed to move. These are the pages a support representative ends up pasting most often, which is exactly why they should exist in public.
A dot is not an answer, so here is every row in full. If you work at one of these recordkeepers and a row is wrong or missing, tell us and it goes in.
We have asked each of these and none of them publishes any of the rows on this page. They are listed rather than omitted because an empty row is a fact about the industry, and because somebody who works at one of them should be able to find their own name here.
Nearly every recordkeeper has a read-only auditor or third party role that the plan administrator grants from the sponsor dashboard. Use it. Sharing your own administrator login instead is the common shortcut and it is a bad one: it gives the auditor transactional authority nobody intended and destroys the audit trail of who did what.
Read access to plan-level reporting for the year under audit, and to the participant-level detail behind it. They do not need the ability to transact, change elections or add users. If the only role on offer grants more than that, say so to the recordkeeper rather than working around it.
Through whatever secure channel the recordkeeper provides rather than email attachments. These files carry names, dates of birth and often full Social Security numbers for the entire workforce, and a plan year of payroll registers in an inbox is a breach waiting to be reported.