For recordkeepers
Make audit season a feature, not a friction point.
Pepper is the audit fulfillment layer for modern retirement plan platforms. We integrate with your systems, pull data directly, and deliver audit-ready packages — without bouncing tickets back to your team.
AICPA EBPAQC Member·API·SFTP·Structured Exports·Direct Partnership Only
01The recordkeeper's audit problem
When your client's audit goes badly, you wear it.
Audit season
Your support team's worst quarter
Plan sponsors don't know what their auditor needs. They ask you. Every request becomes a ticket — and most of those tickets are about data your platform already has.
Churn risk
A bad audit experience drives churn
When a sponsor's auditor delays their Form 5500 or burns forty hours of their team's time, your platform gets the blame — even when the audit firm caused the problem.
Visibility
You don't control the experience
The audit is a black box. You see data flowing out and the engagement letter coming back in. Everything in the middle is invisible to you and confusing to your customer.
02How it works
Direct integration. Visibility stays in your product.
01 / Ingest
Direct data ingestion
Whether you support API access, SFTP, or structured exports, we ingest plan data programmatically. No manual census collection. No screenshots of payroll reports.
02 / Standardize
Audit-ready packages
We work with your data team to standardize the formats we need — census, contributions, distributions, loan activity, trust statements. Once mapped, every subsequent audit runs faster.
03 / Surface
In-product status & signed reports
Audit progress — kickoff confirmed, documents received, fieldwork in progress, report delivered — surfaces inside your portal, and signed reports land there when complete. Sponsors run the audit itself in Pepper, so your team sees where things stand without becoming the help desk.
04 / Start early
Jan 1 audit starts
Because the data flow is automated, we don't wait three months for documents. The day the plan year ends, we can begin fieldwork — and finish months sooner.
03Marketplace partnership
Be the platform that takes audit off your customers' plates.
Discoverable in your audit marketplace
For recordkeepers offering an audit-credit or marketplace experience — think Human Interest's Audit Relief — Pepper plugs in as a participating auditor. Sponsors choose us directly.
Audit status and reports, inside your portal
Live audit status and signed reports surface directly in your portal through our embedded integration — so your customers track progress and pick up finished reports without leaving your product. Sponsors complete the audit itself in Pepper's secure portal, where our team handles the work end-to-end.
04Why now
The audit market hasn't caught up to modern recordkeeping.
The retirement plan audit market is roughly six thousand fragmented CPA firms. Most still ask for spreadsheets. Most still bill hourly. None of them are built to integrate with a modern recordkeeping platform — because they're CPA firms first, and technology firms second.
Pepper is both. We're a licensed CPA firm, so we can sign the opinion. We're a technology company, so we can integrate properly. That combination is rare, and it's exactly what your customers need.
05Independence
No referral fees. No paid placement. By rule.
CPA independence rules prohibit us from paying for referrals or revenue-sharing on the audit work. Most recordkeepers find this reassuring once it's explained: we earn placement on the quality of the work, and your sponsors can trust we weren't chosen because we paid the most.
What we can invest in: co-marketing, joint content, conference presence, technical integration work, and the operational ROI that comes from faster cycle times and lower audit-season support load.
06Getting started
Three conversations. Then we build.
Discovery
Thirty minutes. We learn what your sponsors run into during audit season and where the friction sits.
Integration scope
We map the data we need against what your platform produces and define the integration tier we'll start with.
Pilot
We onboard your first cohort of audit-eligible sponsors. We measure cycle time, support tickets avoided, and sponsor satisfaction. After the pilot, we either deepen the integration or both walk away cleanly.
07Let's talk
Let's talk about taking audit off your customers' plates.
Thirty-minute discovery. No commitment.
Or write to partnerships@pepperauditors.com