Junhyuk Lee
Co-founder and CPO. Your contact for every conversation.
CPA, CISA and CISSP. Financial and IT audits at EY; Master's in Computer Science. Wrote an open-source Korean programming language, 190+ upvotes on Hacker News.
LinkedIn ↗Selling your plan-audit practice, without selling your firm.
Ledgerline buys 401(k) and 403(b) plan-audit practices and books of 1 to 50 plans from CPA owners who are retiring, short on staff, or stepping back from benefit-plan work. You keep every other client and service.
Why owners are stepping back
- 4,045 → fewer every yearCPA firms signed at least one plan audit for plan year 2024. 2,080 of them signed one or two. (DOL Form 5500 Schedule H, PY2024 filings; our count, Sept 2026)
- 724 firmsstopped signing plan audits between plan years 2023 and 2024. Their 1,230 plans mostly moved to firms with 100+ audits. (Same data)
- 70%of audits by firms doing one or two plan audits a year had a major deficiency in the DOL's latest study, versus 17% at firms doing 100 or more. (EBSA Audit Quality Study, Nov 2023)
None of this is about your competence. One or two plan audits a year cannot carry the must-select peer review, the EBP-specific CPE and the recordkeeper reconciliations that the work now demands. Stepping back is the sensible call; the question is how.
How a sale works
- Scope. Your plan audits only, or your whole practice if you prefer. Tax, bookkeeping and advisory stay with you, including for the same clients.
- Price. Price and payment are worked out with you directly, case by case, with no broker in between. Payment is for the purchase of your practice or book and is documented that way.
- Your clients choose. You tell each plan sponsor in writing that you are stepping back and introducing us; the sponsor decides and signs a new engagement letter with our licensed CPA firm. We never contact your clients without your written go-ahead.
- Your role. Stay on through the first season, or longer, on terms agreed separately. Retire when you choose.
- Timing. No rush. Finish this season first; most transitions are timed for the next plan-year audit.
Who you are dealing with
Ledgerline is a San Jose, California company building a CPA firm that does one thing: benefit-plan audits. Our software pulls plan records straight from the recordkeeper, custodian and payroll provider and tests every transaction, so a CPA's hours go to judgment and not to data entry. Audits are performed and signed by the licensed firm and its partners.
Tunde Adewole
Co-founder and CEO.
Repeat YC founder (S22). Built Bridgecard to $1M ARR, acquired by Anchor. Trained an embedding model that outranked Gemini, with 6k downloads.
LinkedIn ↗- ledgerlineaudit.com — the company site
- 401kaudithelp.com — our free reference for plan sponsors: audit thresholds, participant-count rules, calculators
- Ledgerline on LinkedIn
What we commit to
Confidential from the first email. We sign an NDA before you share any client information. Your firm's name is never listed, advertised or shown to other sellers; there is no marketplace behind this page.
Your clients hear from you, not from us. We never contact a plan sponsor until you have written to them and told us to. Sponsor names never appear in anything we publish.
Purchase, documented as a purchase. Payment is a purchase price for your plan-audit practice or book, set in a written agreement. No contingent fees on audit work.
A licensed firm signs. Ledgerline is building a CPA firm around this work. Audits are performed and signed by the licensed CPA firm and its partners, which is also the buyer of record.
Your details stay here. What you type into the form goes to our own database and is read by Junhyuk only. It is not sold, shared or added to any list.
What happens after you write
- Junhyuk replies from his own address within one business day.
- A 20-minute call about your plans, your timing and what you want to keep.
- NDA, then your plan list (sponsor count, participant counts, fees, year-ends). A written indication follows once we have read it.
- If it fits for both sides, a short agreement and a transition plan timed to the next plan-year audit.
Know an owner who is ready to step back?
Introduce us. If the introduction leads to us buying the practice, we pay a $3,000 thank-you at closing, to you or to a charity you choose, and we tell the owner about it up front.