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Next year the Department of Labor plans to mandate that 401(k) providers deliver more transparency to their customers. This is sobering news for a lot of providers that would prefer to keep certain aspects of their plans hidden, but great news for anyone with a 401(k) who needs every bit of his savings for retirement.

There’s no doubt that 401(k)s can offer a powerful benefit to any size business, and today are more affordable than ever. Unfortunately, businesses still need to be wary as they scrutinize the details behind the various offerings in the market. In other words: you need to be ready with the right questions because if you don’t ask, some providers simply won’t tell.

Specifically, here are six things most 401(k) provides don’t want you to know:

1. What you and your employees are paying in participant fees

Employers and employees are typically aware of the fund expenses – also known as expense ratios – in their plan, but are often blind to the other fees that are also tacked on. All in all, employees in small and mid-size company plans are often subjected to paying two to four percent in fees annually on their 401(k) account balances. There’s no need for this to exceed one percent for everything. By staying below the one percent threshold, employees can accumulate tens if not hundreds of thousand dollars more savings over a thirty year career.

What are the other fees? Beyond fund expenses, employees in a plan often pay for record keeping, asset management, and commissions passed back to the plan provider or sales person. Some of these fees are fair – as long as they don’t bring the total amount of employee fees to over one percent. Avoid any fund with a load or any strings attached.

2. Actively managed mutual funds rarely beat the market and aren’t worth paying a premium on

Most 401(k) plans are built with actively managed mutual funds with a goal to beat a benchmark market index (e.g. the S&P 500). Beating the market sounds like a worthy goal, but unfortunately, few fund managers can demonstrate results of doing this consistently over any stretch of time (if ever). Picking stocks is like predicting the weather – very hard to do with any real consistency. Managers not only have to be very good, but they also have to find enough winners to overcome the costs of losers, research, personnel, and added trading costs common with actively managed funds to outperform an index.

One independent study recently evaluated the performance of 2,100 actively managed funds over a 31 year period and found that only 0.6% of fund managers had stock picking success. How different is that from zero?

Demand index funds in your 401(k) plan. You’ll likely be much better off.

3. They share none of the risk or fiduciary duty on your plan (but you sure do)

When you provide 401(k) benefits, you have the duty to run the plan in the best interest of your employees. Part of those duties includes monitoring investment options made available and making changes as appropriate, providing guidance materials to members of the plan etc. And while your rep and provider may have given you a list of funds to select from – and even suggested a few – it’s your responsibility. The very investment expertise the rep is supposed to be providing is really fully on the employer. Bad funds? Your problem. Employee complaints? Your problem. Employee lawsuit? You get the picture.