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If you would like to perform an objective assessment on the performance of your employee benefit programs and evaluate how they have affected your bottom line, UltraLink can help. UltraLink is conducting Benefit Program Audits for employers to help provide a thorough, objective review and evaluation of the performance of each of your employee benefit plans. This audit will give you insight into the performance of your current programs and potentially help shape the future direction your employee benefit programs will take.
The Benefit Program Audit Consists of 4 Steps:
1 - Plan Performance Against Actuarial Model
Step One is a comparison of your benefit plan's financial performance as compared to an actuarial model of how that plan should be performing. The comparison will take into account some of the more significant drivers of financial performance including but not limited to the demographics of your employee population that comprises the plan, the geographical location of the plan and the benefit structure of the plan. This will give you the ability to evaluate the performance against a known standard of your current plans before even contemplating any changes to the benefits.
2 - Plan Performance Against Market
Step Two is a comparison of the benefits offered within a plan against the marketplace. This gives you an assessment of how the benefits you provide employees compares to a specified marketplace. This analysis takes the actuarial results a step further by factoring in the major components that drive program costs at an individual level, which for medical benefits generally consists of plan design and member utilization or experience.
3 - Yearly Benefit Plan Increase Against Average National Increases
Step Three is a comparison of the increases that your broker/consultant has been able to obtain on your behalf for the past one or two years (depending on data available). The comparison will be to the increases on a plan specific basis, if possible, that UltraLink has been able to obtain for our Procurement clients, and to more general industry data for increases on a global basis. This will give you an idea of how your increases contrast to the market increases in general.
4 - Commission Audit
The final component is an audit of the commissions paid to your broker to generate the above results. UltraLink looks at how the commissions have trended over the past few years as compared to how the performance of the various benefit plans have done for your company. As a side-note, this particular component will only be able to focus on the disclosed commissions but there are likely other fees paid from the carrier to the broker that are not disclosed on the
Form 5500 Schedule A.
For information on how you can get a Benefit Program Audit started, or for more information on UltraLink's consulting and administration services, click here and in the comments section mention that you are interested in finding out more about the Benefit Program Audit or call us at 1.800.257.0011.
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