Quantitative data on public and private U.S. companies, extracted and aligned from IRS Form 5500 (ERISA) filings
What is Axiomatic Data?
Quantitative data on public and private U.S. companies, extracted and aligned from IRS Form 5500 (ERISA) filings, which cover retirement and welfare benefit plans and can be leveraged as leading indicators of financial health.
Reliable Source
Form 5500 series is a reporting and disclosure tool used to satisfy annual reporting requirements by public and private companies in the U.S. for employee benefit plans under ERISA and the Internal Revenue Code.
Form 5500 was jointly developed by the Department of Labor (DOL), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Employee benefit plans include welfare benefits such as medical, dental, vision, etc. and retirement benefits such as 401Ks and others.
New from Axiomatic Data
Axiomatic Plan Intelligence
Fund-level 401(k) intelligence built on Form 5500 — Schedule H holdings and Schedule C provider data, structured around the plans, asset managers, and funds that make up the defined-contribution market.
See inside the 401(k) market
We parse the Schedule H Schedule of Assets Held (line 4i) — much of it filed as unstructured PDFs — into clean, fund-level plan holdings that most providers never extract.
Follow the fees and the providers
Schedule C reveals each plan's recordkeeper, advisor, TPA, and broker relationships, with the direct and indirect compensation behind them.
Plans, managers, and funds — scored
Every plan, asset manager, and fund is scored, ranked, and searchable, with year-over-year change tracking across the largest U.S. retirement plans.
Key Features
Point in Time
The database is point in time and meticulously harmonized for a significant number of companies filing under multiple EINs.
Reliable
The data is extracted, ingested and parsed from DOL and IRS every month.
Normalized
Algorithms are created to harmonize and normalize the data that is across multiple EINs, years, forms, and schedules for consistent insights.
Clean
Algorithms are created to clean data, structure data format, identify and treat outliers, treat missing values.
Compliant
The data does not contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII), is compliant to GDPR, and is not exclusively available to any buy side client.
Ticker-Mapped
Six years of point in time historical data has been mapped to Russell 3000 tickers and is available for testing.
Use Cases
For public company investors
For quant and fundamental investors
Changes to employee benefit plans over time can signal changes in growth rates and overall financial health.
For short-sellers
Deceleration in employee benefit contributions and programs can signal payment delinquency and impending stock weakness.
For ESG investors
The ability to compare employee benefit plans across all companies and industries (broad coverage) at an extremely high level of granularity.
- Employee Benefits: Do companies with better employee benefit plans outperform those with poor employee benefits?
- Red Flags / Credit analysis:Performance of companies that stop certain employee benefit plans.
Additional signals
- Growth trends:Growth rate of current employees participating in welfare and pension plans and contributions, signal growth in earnings.
- Macro signals:Aggregated data and metrics on employment, contributions, and credit enable zip code level, MSA level and industry level analysis.
For private company investors
Due diligence
Form 5500 data being a mandatory government requirement, our firmographics data, such as number of employees participating in a benefit plan, sourced from these filings, is of the highest quality.
Benchmark
Compare and benchmark employee benefit plans across all US private companies, including private equity and venture capital portfolios.
Additional signals
- Industry analysis and hiring trends.
- Monitor employee growth rates by company and by industry.
- High Quality Estimated Revenue.
- Consistent yearly longitudinal data for these companies.
What Axiomatic Offers?
For Quant Funds
- Over 5 years of history.
- Russell 3000 coverage.
- Point in time historical data mapped to tickers.
- Clean harmonized raw data.
For Discretionary / Hedge funds
- Variety of purchase options for smaller ticker universes.
- Ticker via API.
For Traditional Long only fundamental funds
- Analytics and aggregated metrics.
- Dashboards on the data to save time.
What format is the test data in?
Either CSV or JSON.
When is the data delivered?
The data is delivered on the second Monday of each month.
