As companies grow over time, they achieve certain milestones. Hitting 100 employees for the first time is one such milestone.

Once you're done celebrating this major accomplishment, there are a number of issues to start thinking about including the "80-120 rule" for employee benefit plans. Although the details of the "80-120 rule" can be tricky, if you expect your business and head count to continue growing your employee benefit plans will probably exceed 120 participants. If that happens, under Department of Labor rules, you will be required to have the employee benefit plan audited with the results submitted to the DOL.

For the first time, an independent auditor will be looking at your company's adherence to the employee benefit plan document, timeliness of deposits, accuracy and completeness of your employee personnel files, and how forfeitures are handled. All of this will be done with the protection of the plan participants in mind.