You can learn a lot about a company by what happens behind the scenes on FreeERISA.

Last week we opened the book on BNY Mellon’s 401(k) to see how their own plan was performing in light of a new investment management leader.

It's time to take a deeper dive into what you can learn from a 5500. Like dinosaur DNA extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber, well be putting a single company under the microscope in the coming weeks. But which company?

Over the years, FreeERISA has tried a lot of things to make lead generation more effective, like plan type searches and the Whack-a-Health-Plan Flash game. Despite our best efforts, few things remain as popular as the ability to pull up benefit and retirement plans by ZIP code.

Last week, BenefitsPro ran a story on 401(k) assets: apparently they hit a record high of $3.075 trillion in 2010.

No matter how you measure it, the employee benefits and retirement industries involve trillions of dollars. That's more than the GDP of Farmville.

Rather than provide raw data the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration (now EBSA) gave her, Judy took the extra step of reorganizing the government data into something useful.

As promised, part one of where FreeERISA came from (and where its going).