Note: The Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey is available only for plans that started in 2024. If your plan launched before 2024, stay tuned for an update.
The “Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey” is a survey for employers to fill out about their business and employees. This survey obtains necessary information for year-end compliance testing. The survey collects data on:
-
- Company Owners (and family members of owners)
- Company Officers
- Prior Year Gross Compensation
This article will discuss how you can navigate to and complete the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey.
-
- Navigating to the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey
- How to Complete the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey
Navigating to the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey
- After completing the onboarding process, log in to your employer portal and go to your home page.
- From here, underneath the “Plan To-Dos” section, click on Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey.
How to Complete the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey
Once you have followed the steps above to navigate to the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey, you will be prompted to fill out the survey. To complete the survey, follow these steps:
Step 1: Identify Owners
The first page of the survey is titled “Identify Owners.” From this page, you will be able to enter information about the owners of your company.
What is an “Owner?”
For the purpose of this survey, owners are people who had ownership in the company at any time during the plan year or the 12 months preceding the plan year. Non-employee owners are required to be provided if they have family members who are employees of the company.
If your business does not have any owners, you can quickly bypass this first step in the survey by selecting the “No Owners” checkbox.
If your business does have owners, they will need to be added during this step. There are two ways to add owners:
- Add an owner who is a participant in your business’s plan, or
- Add an owner who is not a participant in the plan or an employee of your business
To Add an Owner Who Is a Participant in Your Plan
- Search for an owner’s name in the “Search by Name” field.
- Begin typing the name of the employee, then select their name from the dropdown.
- Once you click on their name from the search bar list, they will automatically be populated to the list of owners. From here, be sure to add in the date they became an owner, their ownership percentage, and their family members, if applicable.
Note: Family member(s) need to be added when an employee has a family member who is either a participant in the plan and/or an owner of the business.
To Add an Owner Who Is not a Participant in Your Plan or an Employee
- Click on the blue + Add non-employee owner button.
- Fill in the corresponding information in the form that populates below.
- Click Add New Owner.
Once you are finished adding owners, click Save & Continue.
Step 2: Identify Officers
The second step in completing the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey is to identify the officers in your business.
What is an “Officer?”
An officer is an administrative executive who is in regular and continued service. An employee who merely has the title of an officer but not the authority of an officer is not considered an officer for this purpose. Similarly, an employee who does not have the title of an officer but has the authority of an officer is an officer for this purpose.
If your business does not have any officers, you can quickly bypass this step in the survey by selecting the “No Officers” checkbox.
If your business has officers, they will need to be added during this step. You can easily indicate your employees who are officers by clicking on the check box next to their name in the column titled “Mark as Officer.” A green popup will appear when you have successfully added or updated an officer.
Once you are finished adding officers, click Save & Continue.
Step 3: Report the Prior Year Gross Compensation
The final step in the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey is to report the total compensation paid to your employees during the prior year.
There are two methods for reporting gross compensation:
Once you are finished reporting the prior year's compensation, click Complete Survey. You should see a “Congratulations!” message indicating that you have successfully completed the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey.
Upload File
You may upload a file detailing the gross compensation of your employees. Please ensure that your file contains each employee’s social security number and their prior year's compensation. Employee name is optional. Here are some tips on formatting your spreadsheet:
- Social Security Numbers must contain dashes, those without dashes will not be recognized.
- Compensation cannot contain commas or $ signs.
- The file must be a .csv, no other document type will be accepted.
Once you have finished preparing your file, save the document to your computer. To upload the file, select the blue Upload button. This will populate your computer files, from which you can select your file and upload it.
Manually Fill Out
To manually fill in the compensation data for your employees, click on the $0.00 in the column titled “20XX Gross Compensation” and type in the dollar amount for each employee.
After submitting the prior year's compensation, please remember to select Complete Survey.
If you have any difficulties completing the Post-Onboarding Compliance Survey, please do not hesitate to contact everyday401k.help@vestwell.com.