ERPA · CPC · QPA — Qualified Plan Consulting
ERPA Services helps closely held business owners and their professional teams resolve complex qualified-plan questions before a plan decision becomes an expensive commitment.
"Clear judgment for complex retirement-plan decisions."
Sandra R. Turner, ERPA, CPC, QPA, founded the retirement-plan consulting and administration practice now known as Turner Pension Solutions, where she continues to serve as President Emeritus. Her career spans the full arc of qualified-plan work — from designing and administering advanced structures for closely held businesses to representing clients before the IRS to engaging directly with the policy environment that shapes retirement-plan rules.
Her technical work has always centered on the cases that require real judgment: owner-focused plan design where the workforce composition, ownership structure, and tax objectives have to be carefully balanced; correction situations where the stakes are high enough that the analysis matters; and plan-design reviews where the difference between a well-structured plan and a compliance problem comes down to details most general practitioners don't catch.
Beyond the practice, Sandra has engaged with retirement-plan policy at the national level — testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Small Business on pension simplification, participating as a delegate to the National Summit on Retirement Savings, and leading discussions on small-business retirement issues at the SBA Office of Advocacy. She is a recognized leader within the Small Business Council of America, where she received the Connie Murdoch Award and later joined the board.
Today, ERPA Services exists for the questions that should not be handled by default assumptions: owner-focused plan designs, correction decisions, second opinions, and professional-team situations where the answer needs to be tested before anyone moves forward.
Business owners and their professional teams bring their hardest qualified-plan questions to Sandra because she's seen these problems from every angle — as a plan designer, an administrator, a compliance specialist, and a policy participant. That combination is rare.
Sandra has designed and administered advanced qualified plans — cash balance, defined benefit, cross-tested profit sharing, integrated, safe harbor — for decades. She doesn't consult from a general framework. She consults from the details.
Enrolled Retirement Plan Agent status grants Sandra the right to represent clients before the IRS on qualified-plan matters. When a correction or audit situation requires more than analysis, she can identify the exposure, prepare the path forward, and act on it — not just advise on it.
Sandra's career intersected with the legislative and regulatory environment around small-business pension reform — including congressional testimony, national retirement savings summits, and engagement with the SBA Office of Advocacy. She understands how these rules came to exist, which shapes how she applies them.
The questions that matter most to closely held business owners — how much can the owner shelter, what happens when the workforce changes, where the testing exposure sits — are questions Sandra has worked through hundreds of times. She separates what is possible from what is practical before the plan is put in motion.
When a business owner needs a better answer — or when the CPA, advisor, TPA, or attorney supporting that owner needs senior technical backup — ERPA Services provides the judgment behind the next step.
ERPA Services is not built around volume administration. It is built around the moments when a business owner, CPA, advisor, attorney, or TPA needs senior judgment before moving forward.
The owner may be trying to shelter more income, reward key people, revisit an existing plan, or understand why the answer they received feels too limited. Sandra reviews what is possible, what is practical, and what has to be structured carefully before the owner commits to a design that may be difficult to unwind.
When the client's goals involve advanced design, testing exposure, ownership changes, or correction questions, ERPA Services serves as the senior technical resource that pressure-tests the assumptions before a recommendation goes forward.
Operational failures, testing problems, document issues, IRS correspondence, and audit concerns require a correction path — not guesswork. Sandra identifies the exposure, clarifies the correction path, and determines the next right step.
Three focused consulting lanes — for business owners weighing consequential plan decisions and for the professional teams responsible for helping those decisions work in practice.
Before a plan is implemented — or when an existing design isn't working the way it should — Sandra reviews the full picture: ownership structure, workforce composition, testing exposure, and owner objectives together.
Operational failures compound when left unaddressed. ERPA Services provides correction-path analysis and strategic guidance — before the IRS identifies the problem rather than after.
CPAs, advisors, TPAs, and attorneys use ERPA Services when a client situation requires deeper qualified-plan judgment than their normal workflow provides — before the recommendation goes forward.
The right engagement usually involves a closely held business, a professional team, and a plan decision with meaningful stakes — where the standard answer carries risk, where complexity makes confidence hard to come by, or where the decision is too important to get wrong.
You want more from your retirement plan than a standard 401(k), or the answer you received does not seem to fit your business, ownership structure, tax objectives, or workforce reality. Sandra reviews the tradeoffs before you commit to a design that may be difficult to unwind.
Your client is asking retirement-plan questions that go beyond ordinary tax planning. Before the strategy is recommended or implemented, ERPA Services can review the technical design and compliance implications.
When a client situation involves cash balance, cross-tested, or defined benefit plan design — and the plan needs to work correctly from day one — a qualified-plan second opinion can protect the recommendation.
When a plan situation falls outside the normal workflow — an unusual correction scenario, a complex testing question, or an ownership change with plan implications — senior review can resolve the issue faster.
ERISA-adjacent questions, correction situations, and complex plan matters may require a senior practitioner with IRS representation authority and decades of qualified-plan experience.
Operational failures, testing failures, IRS correspondence, or a looming audit. The question is not whether to act — it is how. ERPA Services helps identify the correction pathway and exposure.
Turner Pension Solutions handles ongoing plan administration. ERPA Services is designed for complex plan-design questions, technical second opinions, remediation strategy, and advanced owner-focused qualified-plan consulting.
It is not intended for routine payroll processing, basic recordkeeping support, general investment management, standard employee enrollment help, or commodity 401(k) administration without a technical issue.
You do not need to know the final answer before reaching out. The first step is explaining the plan situation, the answer you were given, and what still does not seem settled.
The most productive first conversations involve a specific plan situation — an owner objective under consideration, an answer that needs to be tested, a compliance problem that needs triage, or a professional-team question that requires more than general guidance can provide.