DOL VFCP calculator alternative: check the plan’s history first

What the DOL VFCP calculator actually does

From the Department of Labor’s own page for the Voluntary Fiduciary Correction Program online calculator (dol.gov/agencies/ebsa, read 2026-08-26):

“The online calculator is designed to enhance accuracy, ensure consistency, and expedite the process for VFCP applications. By using the Online Calculator, applicants can efficiently calculate the Correction Amounts owed.”

The same page is explicit about its own limits:

“Please be aware that relying solely on the calculator to determine and repay lost earnings does not fulfill the full correction requirements under the VFCP.”

In plain terms: you give it the amount and the dates of one late transmittal, and it returns the lost earnings owed back to participants, computed on the IRC section 6621 underpayment interest rate. That is one number, for one transmittal, arrived at after you already know you have one and have already decided how to correct it.

What it does not do

It does not say whether a plan has a late-deposit problem at all, whether that problem repeated across plan years, or what the employer’s own excise-tax exposure looks like separately from the participants’ lost earnings.

That last distinction is the one this whole site is built on. The calculator prices lost earnings owed back to the plan’s participants. The excise tax is a different number owed by a different party to a different agency: a late transmittal is a prohibited transaction carrying an initial tax equal to 15 percent of the amount involved, for each year or part of a year in the taxable period, under 26 U.S.C. 4975(a), reported and paid on Form 5330 by the employer and not by the plan. None of that appears anywhere in the calculator’s output. What it works out to across a three-year pattern is its own page, and when the Form 5330 is due is another.

Correcting through VFCP can relieve that excise tax, but only when the plan meets the conditions of Prohibited Transaction Exemption 2002-51. Outside those conditions, or without using the program at all, paying lost earnings does not by itself address the excise-tax exposure. Which correction path a plan qualifies for turns on facts the calculator never asks about.

Where Planremit fits, and where it does not

Planremit is not a calculator and does not compete with the DOL’s tool on its own ground: it never computes lost earnings, and it never puts a dollar exposure on any one plan’s excise-tax liability. What it answers is the question that usually comes first. Enter a plan sponsor’s EIN or name and it reads that plan’s own Schedule H line 4a for 2022, 2023 and 2024, then reports whether the plan self-reported a late transmittal in one of those years, a pattern across two or three, or none at all. No account, about a minute.

For a plan sponsor, TPA or auditor heading toward a VFCP application, that is the step before the calculator rather than a substitute for it: know whether there is a repeat pattern, and how many years it covers, before deciding what to feed the calculator at all. A year still reporting “Yes” is not automatically a year still open, either, since line 4a carries the amount forward until the year after full correction. Running the EIN through planremit.com/check answers that first question directly.

Two adjacent questions, two other free tools

Neither of these is a lost-earnings calculator either, and both answer a question the DOL’s calculator assumes you have already settled.

• Whether a deposit was late at all: the remittance deadline lookup applies the 29 CFR 2510.3-102 standard and its outer limit by withholding month and plan size, without pretending to compute a specific plan’s own segregation date.
• When the excise-tax return is due: the Form 5330 due date calculator runs that arithmetic against an employer’s own tax year end.

What this page is not

This is not a replacement for the DOL’s calculator and not a second opinion on its arithmetic. Where a correction path calls for it, that calculator is the one to use, and its own page is the place that says running it is not by itself a complete correction. This page is about sequence: what is worth establishing before the calculator is the right next step, and which of the two numbers in play a lost-earnings figure actually covers.

Sources

• DOL, Voluntary Fiduciary Correction Program online calculator (dol.gov/agencies/ebsa), read 2026-08-26: both passages quoted above, and the IRC section 6621 underpayment interest rate the calculator applies.
• 26 U.S.C. 4975(a) and (b): the initial 15 percent excise tax on the amount involved for each year or part of a year in the taxable period, and the additional 100 percent tax if the transaction is not corrected within that period.
• IRS Form 5330 and its instructions: the return the employer, not the plan, files to report and pay that tax.
• Prohibited Transaction Exemption 2002-51: the conditions under which correcting through VFCP can relieve the excise tax.
• 29 CFR 2510.3-102 and Form 5500, Schedule H, line 4a: the timing standard, and the plan’s own annual self-report against it. The full method is at planremit.com/method.

This is independent research on public filings and published primary sources, not legal or tax advice, and nothing here is a finding about any particular plan.