Filing three years late costs $7,078,226, or $1,500, depending who speaks first.

Begin with the number everybody in the benefits trade already knows and nobody has priced. ERISA § 502(c)(2) lets the Secretary assess a plan administrator who fails to file an annual report “in an amount not to exceed $1,100 a day from the date of such refusal or failure,” indexed; the 2025 adjustment at 90 FR 1854 set it at $2,739. There is no aggregate cap in the statute, no ceiling in the regulation, and no forgiveness written anywhere in Title I. A calendar-year plan that has not filed for 2022, 2023 and 2024 is, on today’s date, 1,177, 811 and 446 days late — 2,434 days of exposure, $6,666,726. Add the Internal Revenue Code and it is $7,078,226.

Now the document that cancels it. The Delinquent Filer Voluntary Compliance Program, restated at 67 FR 15052 on 28 March 2002 over the signature of Assistant Secretary Ann L. Combs, provides that “the applicable penalty amount is $10 per day for each day the annual report is filed” after it was due, “not to exceed the greater of: $750 per annual report” for a small plan and $2,000 for a large one, and — the sentence that does the work — $1,500 per plan and $4,000 per plan for a submission covering several years at once. Three missing years and thirty missing years cost the same. A small plan sponsored by a 501(c)(3) pays $750 for the lot.

So the ratio is 4,718.82×, and it is published by the same agency on the same website. That is not the finding. The finding is in § 2.02, which makes relief available only to an administrator who complies “prior to the date on which the administrator is notified in writing by the Department of a failure to file a timely annual report.” The entitlement is not extinguished by time, by the size of the arrears, or by how long the administrator knew. It is extinguished by a letter. Which means the seven-figure number is not a penalty at all. It is the price of losing a race, and the race is against the agency that publishes the starting list.

It does publish it. EBSA maintains the Form 5500 Datasets — structured data from every Form 5500 and 5500-SF filed since 1999, free to download, and for 2009 onward “typically updated around the first of each month, give or take a few days.” A plan that appears in the 2022 and 2023 files and not in the 2024 file is a sponsor name, an employer identification number, a three-digit plan number and an administrator’s address, sitting in a federal file a month after the deadline passed. The United States government ships the delinquency list to anyone who asks and then waits an unspecified number of months before writing the letter that makes it worthless.

The volume says the queue is real and growing. EBSA’s fiscal-year fact sheet reports that “EBSA received 24,513 annual reports through this program in FY 2025” — against the Department’s own paperwork estimate for the same collection of 11,554 respondents, which is +112.16%. For comparison, the Voluntary Fiduciary Correction Program, which the whole industry talks about, took 797 applications in the same year. Thirty delinquent annual reports arrive at EBSA for every fiduciary correction, and the one that is thirty times larger has no advisory industry attached to it, because the fee it generates is small and the penalty it extinguishes belongs to somebody else.

Here is the second half, eleven months old and almost unreported. On 31 December 2025, at 90 FR 61411, Assistant Secretary Daniel Aronowitz signed a notice extending “the same $750 maximum penalty amount currently available to small plans filing a late Form 5500” to plan MEWAs, non-plan MEWAs and ECEs required to file Form M-1. Their statutory rate, under § 502(c)(5), is $1,992 a day, also uncapped: a single M-1 three years late is $2,344,584, now settleable for $750, a ratio of 3,126.11×. The population is countable because EBSA counts it: the 2023 Form M-1 Bulletin records 939 filings from 795 unique entities — 737 plan MEWAs, 49 non-plan MEWAs, 9 ECEs — covering 2,993,331 participants in all fifty states. Seven hundred and ninety-five names, each holding a seven-figure contingent liability that a $750 payment retires.

And the pattern break proper, which is that the meter stopped. The Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015 requires every agency to adjust its penalties “no later than January 15 of each year,” using October CPI-U. There was no October 2025 CPI-U. So the Office of Management and Budget “issued OMB memorandum M-26-11, which informed agencies of the cancellation of the penalty inflation adjustment for 2026,” and on 27 May 2026, at 91 FR 31358, Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling published the Department’s non-adjustment: “OMB instructed agencies to continue using the 2025 civil monetary penalties as applicable.” At the 2025 multiplier of 1.02598 the rate would have gone to $2,810. It is the first year since the Act took hold that a federal civil penalty did not rise with prices, and the cliff it sits on narrowed by $71 a day for everyone standing on the wrong side of it.

One more thing, and it is the quiet evidence that nobody reads any of this. Three federal pages price this exposure today and all three are stale. EBSA’s own penalty fact sheet still prints $2,670 and $1,942, the January 2024 figures. The DFVCP landing page describes the Form M-1 rate as “up to $1,942 per day,” also the 2024 number. And the IRS page on penalty relief for DFVC filers still describes the waived amount as “$25 per day … up to $15,000,” a figure the SECURE Act multiplied by ten in 2019 to $250 a day and $150,000. The government is quoting its own prices from memory.