Success Story

Company Situation:

Crowe LLP is the 9th largest accounting firm in the U.S., with more than 4,500 employees in 44 offices around the country. Their ESOP Practice provides retirement plan consulting and administrative services to ESOP companies. Although Crowe offers distribution services to their ESOP clients, they are not set up to quickly handle large numbers of payouts.

When one of Crowe’s ESOP clients was acquired by another company, the deal gave the client only a few days after the transaction closed to start distributing the proceeds from the transaction. Crowe and the ESOP trustee needed a solution that could process a lot of distributions much more quickly than normal. If the distributions could not be offered quickly, it was possible the deal would have to be renegotiated, a time-consuming and costly process.

Shuler expressed his confidence in PenChecks’ ability to complete all the distributions within the given deadline, and the client gave the go-ahead to proceed. Working closely with a dedicated onboarding representative, Shuler spearheaded the process of making sure PenChecks received all the participant data and corresponding funding in a timely manner. With more than 1,800 employees and close to $1 billion in assets involved in the distribution, PenChecks went onsite to the client’s two locations to assist and answer any questions the employees had about the process. PenChecks used its highly efficient payment processing technology to mail and process all the benefit elections and complete the entire group of distributions within the required deadline. Afterwards, PenChecks followed through with all the tax remittance and reporting requirements—so neither Crowe LLP nor their client would have to.

Results:

Plan participants were happy to transfer their money to the new plan quickly. Shuler and his team were able to assist one of their best clients in completing a very important deal.