Chairman Neal, Ranking Member English, and Members of the Subcommittee, we appreciate the opportunity to testify before you. We are submitting our testimony as a single joint statement because we believe strongly in the need for a common strategy to expand retirement savings in a manner that transcends ideological and partisan differences.
Our statement focuses on your bill — H.R. 2167, The Automatic IRA Act – which had its genesis in our joint proposal to expand retirement savings for small business workers. We are pleased by the positive responses the proposal has received and are grateful to you for introducing and sponsoring it, and to our colleagues, including those in government and in various stakeholder organizations, who have contributed to the ideas reflected in the proposal.
With the looming retirement security crisis facing our country, policy-makers from both parties are focused on ways to strengthen pensions and increase savings. Our proposal for automatic IRAs would provide a relatively simple, cost-effective way to increase retirement security for the 75 million Americans working for employers (usually small businesses) that do not offer a retirement plan. It would enable these employees to save for retirement by allowing them to have their employers regularly transfer amounts from their paycheck to an IRA.
These people – half of our workforce – have no effective way to save at work. This fact, a national saving rate that has been declining steadily since the 1980s (to the point where it has dropped below zero), and the expectation that Social Security is unlikely to provide increased benefits, make inadequate retirement saving a major national problem. Research and experience both point to a simple and effective solution, which your bill calls the “automatic IRA.”
We are by no means suggesting that the automatic IRA proposal is the only step that should be taken to expand retirement savings for small business workers or others. In fact, we have long believed in the primacy of employer-sponsored retirement plans as vehicles for pension coverage. Additionally, the Retirement Security Project continues to advocate strongly for the expansion of pension coverage through automatic features in 401(k) and similar retirement savings plans and for several other initiatives designed to expand retirement security, especially for the moderate- and lower-income households that comprise a majority of the U.S. population.
Making saving easier by making it automatic has been shown to be remarkably effective at boosting participation in 401(k) plans, but roughly half of U.S. workers are not offered a 401(k) or any other type of employer-sponsored plan. We would extend the benefits of automatic saving to a far wider array of the population by combining several key elements of our current system: payroll deposit saving, automatic enrollment, low-cost, diversified default investments, and IRAs.
The automatic IRA approach we propose offers most employees not covered by an employer-sponsored retirement plan the opportunity to save through the powerful mechanism of regular payroll deposits that continue automatically. The employer’s administrative functions are minimal and should involve no out of pocket cost. In addition, the arrangement is market-oriented and realistic: it uses a well established and familiar vehicle, IRAs, provided by the same banks, mutual funds, insurance carriers, brokerage firms, credit unions, and other private financial institutions that currently provide them. As a fallback, if individuals or employers could not find an acceptable IRA on the market, they would be able to use ready-made, low-cost automatic IRA accounts provided by a consortium or pool of private-sector financial institutions or another nonprofit or government-contracted entity that contracts out asset management and other functions to the private sector.
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Authors
J. Mark Iwry
Nonresident Senior Fellow - Economic Studies
