Why I built this
Josh Panfil
I’m Josh, a sophomore studying finance at USC. Last year I came across a statistic that stopped me mid-scroll: Americans have over $2.1 trillion sitting in forgotten 401(k) accounts — money that belongs to real people who simply lost track of it when they changed jobs.
Most of those people don’t know the money exists. The process to find it is genuinely painful: you’d need to remember every employer you’ve ever had, look up each one in the DOL database manually, and file paperwork to make a claim. Nobody has time for that.
So I built VaultTrace in two days to do it automatically. Upload your IRS Wage & Income Transcript, and VaultTrace reconstructs your full employer history, cross-references it against the DOL retirement plan database, and surfaces likely matches — in about 20 seconds.
“Find what’s still yours.” That’s the whole thing.
How it works
The technical version, for those who want to know exactly what’s happening to their data.
Step 1 — IRS transcript parsing
Your IRS Wage & Income Transcript is a PDF that lists every employer who reported wages on your behalf going back to 1993. It contains the employer’s name and their EIN (Employer Identification Number) — the tax ID that uniquely identifies each business.
VaultTrace passes the raw PDF bytes to a Claude AI vision model, which reads the document and extracts each employer record. IRS transcripts are tricky — employer names are truncated to 35 characters and EINs are sometimes partially redacted. The parser reconstructs multi-line names and handles redacted EINs by falling back to fuzzy name matching against a local EIN reference database of common employers.
The transcript is processed entirely in memory and discarded the moment parsing completes. We never write it to disk.
Step 2 — DOL Form 5500 database
Any employer that offers a retirement plan with more than one participant must file an annual Form 5500 with the Department of Labor. The DOL publishes all of these filings going back to 2000 through their EFAST2 system — roughly 800,000 active plans.
For each employer in your transcript, VaultTrace queries the EFAST2 API first by EIN (exact match), then by name (fuzzy match as fallback). A hit means that employer filed a 5500, which is strong evidence a retirement plan existed — and may still contain your contributions.
We also check the PBGC Missing Participants Program (for terminated pension plans) and 10 state unclaimed property databases in parallel, so the total scan time is roughly as long as the slowest single lookup — usually 10–20 seconds.
Step 3 — Confidence scoring
Every match gets a score from 0–95%. The score is built from weighted signals:
Scores are capped at 95% because final confirmation always requires contacting the plan administrator directly. A high score means the evidence is strong — it doesn’t guarantee an active balance.
Data security
Your uploaded files are processed in memory and deleted immediately — never written to disk or stored on our servers. If you optionally provide your SSN for a registry cross-reference, it is used for that single lookup and never persisted anywhere.
We store only what’s needed to show your results: the extracted employer names, scan matches, and your email address if you provided one. All connections are TLS-encrypted. We use zero third-party ad trackers.
Read the full security breakdown →Get in touch
Questions, feedback, or found a bug? I’d genuinely love to hear from you — especially if VaultTrace helped you find something.
josh@vaulttrace.org