Thrift Savings

At the federal level, Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said in May that workers whose employers don’t offer a retirement plan should be able to join the Thrift Savings Plan. The TSP is a low-cost, 401(k)-type plan available to federal employees, including those in Congress, which holds more than $400 billion in assets. The senator will continue to push for such reforms in 2015, spokesman Alex Conant said.

Rubio’s plan mirrors President Barack Obama’s MyRA program, scheduled to start at the end of the year, which allows Americans without access to retirement plans to open individual retirement accounts and invest in a government bond fund.

Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican who is poised to become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in January, has a proposal that would encourage small businesses to offer 401(k)-type plans and let them pool assets with other employers to reduce costs. Hatch, in a December speech in Washington, said he would push for such changes in 2015.

Avoiding Leaks

Few laws on retirement security have advanced in Congress during Obama’s administration because much of the policy is rooted in U.S. tax law. Efforts to advance the broadest tax-code revamp since 1986 have stalled.

Once people are putting money in 401(k)s, attention turns to keeping it from leaking out. Many workers have tapped the accounts to pay bills since the financial crisis of 2008-2009 limited the liquidity they had in their homes. The Internal Revenue Service collected about $5.7 billion in 2011 from penalties for early withdrawals from accounts.

David Laibson, a Harvard University economics professor, suggests giving employees two savings accounts at work: a 401(k) only for retirement, and another whose funds could be withdrawn for emergencies or life events without penalty. The proposal would leverage automatic deductions from workers’ paychecks to promote savings, he said.

Plan Disparity

A separate camp of people would reduce rather than increase employers’ role in the system because of the wide discrepancies in how companies set up their 401(k)s.

“We have this patchwork retirement system that works well for some but not everyone by any means,” said John Rekenthaler, vice president of research at Morningstar Inc.

Regulations give employers discretion on 401(k) investment choices and fees as long as they are reasonable. They aren’t required to contribute to workers’ accounts, and if they do, they can stop their payments at will.