If they do it like most of these places do they are trying to weight 27 different things which gives a very inaccurate picture.

Only a few things matter.

#1 is percent of company match.
#2 is fees of funds
#3 is fund choice diversity.
#4 is do they require you to purchase company stock.

Thats it. Anything else is really quite meaningless. But I bet a company that is super on those 4 categories could get dinged on other meaningless categories and score similiarly to someone who doesn’t do as well on these categories yet does great on something else such as percent participation or participation at different income levels, neither of which make one bit of difference to how my money performs.

Thus I take these kinds of ratings to be interesting from a ball parking standpoint but not usually very good when you get to the details.

This bill died in 2007 but has been revived:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-401

Anyhow, the bill wouldn’t necessarily provide *prospective* employees access to the data, but it would be helpful to actual employees (and improve the data they shared if the choose to do so).

I’ve been writing to the senators involved requesting the an amendment along the lines of the following:

“Permit employees to “rollout” tax-free any or all 401(k) funds once per year during a “rollout period” to any retirement account into which they would be permitted a tax-free rollover at the end of an employment relationship. This would immediately free employees from fee-laden plans and in more control of their retirement while encouraging such plans through free market forces to be more competitive.”