Citrin Cooperman Certified Public Accountants & Advisors shifts from manual to an automated EBP audit confirmation workflow with Confirmation.com
Citrin Cooperman CPAs and Advisors, a large firm with multiple locations across the US northeast, is a giant in the areas of tax compliance, consulting, business advisory, and audit services. And like any rapidly growing enterprise, leaders within are always looking for ways to streamline workflow and drive efficiency.
Audit Supervisor, Tara Russell, and Audit Partner, Soula Tsambiras of Citrin Cooperman explained the firm’s evolution from a manual employee benefit plan (EBP) audit process to a far more efficient workflow using Confirmation.com.
“Before Confirmation.com, we would mail paper confirmations through regular mail or hand the confirmation to the employee at their place of business,” said Tsambiras.
According to both Tsambiras and Russell, the process of delivering confirmations to employees worked well when dealing with businesses where all employees were in one location. In many instances, however, this wasn’t the case. The firm would then revert to mailing confirmations to participants, which involved a great deal of manual preparation by Citrin Cooperman staff. The process also yielded less than desirable response results.
“A lot of people didn’t take the time to complete confirmations and then mail them back, so the process was not ideal,” Tsambiras stated.
In the past year, with a focus on improving productivity around EBP audits, the firm began its transition away from manual processes.
The road to a streamlined, efficient workflow
According to Tara Russell, the firm officially started using Confirmation.com for EBP audits in 2015. “I consistently look to Confirmation.com for new services they are offering. When I saw the emails about the EBP service, I brought it to the attention of Soula [Tsambiras].”
And then in May of 2015, Tsambiras and Russell attended the AICPA Employee Benefit Plan Conference. While at the event, they were able to speak one-on-one with an audit workflow expert. Soon after, they decided to adopt Confirmation.com’s EBP service — and so began the transformation to a more automated, streamlined process.
Implementation of the service, according to both Russell and Tsambiras, was fairly easy. They held a few staff meetings to train employees on the service and proper procedures around EBP confirmations using Confirmation.com’s online platform.
“Employees came up the learning curve quickly,” Russell stated. “We had a few questions here and there, but the system is very intuitive.”
Powerful features get results
While the firm is still primarily mails EBP confirmations, the entire process is handled within Confirmation.com — simplifying workflow and offering a single system to track and monitor responses.
“We send almost all EBP confirmations by mail, but now we do it from Confirmation.com. The system has a great feature where it looks up and verifies addresses for us, so it’s very efficient. It’s a great feature to support our audit process,” said Tsambiras.
Further adding to an efficient process, Tsambiras also mentioned another favorite feature: “The system will send out a second request. We can just click a button and the second request notice will be sent to the participant. This saves a lot of time because we don’t have to have a staff person manually mailing follow-up requests.”
Tracking confirmations is also much easier using the system, which has saved the firm a lot of time. Prior to Confirmation.com, the firm used Excel spreadsheets to track responses.
“It’s much easier to track confirmations now. If a participant responds electronically, then the system automatically tracks that for us. If we receive a response through the mail, all we have to do is go in and mark that it was received and with the click of a button you have your control that you can put in the audit file,” explained Russell. “So it definitely takes us less time to track responses using the system.”
The review process has also improved. “Confirmation.com has helped to streamline the audit process across all audit types and engagement teams. This is particularly valuable when you process 100 plus EBP audits,” said Russell.
Final words
Tsambiras, confirmed that Confirmation.com was the right move for the firm: “It gave us an added level of comfort using a system with exceptional security ... we also love the convenience of the address lookup feature because we know it’s providing current info and that saves time and effort.”
Overall, the firm is highly satisfied with workflow enhancements after moving to Confirmation.com — and improved efficiency is at the top of the list. In fact, Russell stated, “I don’t think any employee would say they preferred the old, manual process where they folded paper and stuffed envelopes. We operate so much more efficiently now.”
