The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is calling for federal legislation that would allow the U.S. Secretary of Labor to establish standards for employee benefit plan (EBP) audits, as well as require additional education for the CPAs who perform them. The call comes after a recent agency study found that 39 percent of EBP audits contained major deficiencies. The study, issued in May, examined 400 of the 81,162 EBP audits filed by approximately 7,300 firms in 2011. Audits were categorized by the size of a firm’s employee benefit plan audit practice, which the DOL pointed out was not necessarily reflective of the size of the firm overall.