Almost 8,000 people took out Personal Retirement Savings Accounts (PRSAs) in the three months to the end of March, according to figures released yesterday by the Pensions Board.
The new subscriptions bring the total number of PRSAs taken out by Irish workers since the accounts were launched a year ago to 26,899. The cumulative assets held in the portable pension products rose from €41 million at the end of last year to €60.5 million at March 31st.
The increase has been described as "steady progress" by the Pensions Board. The board's chief executive, Ms Anne Maher, acknowledged last night however that more work needed to be done if private pensions coverage was to meet the Government's goal of rising from 50 to 70 per cent of workforce.
"We thought the last quarter had gone pretty well," she said, adding that the board "would like to see it go up more".
It is thought that pensions coverage now stands at 53 or 54 per cent. Some commentators, including Ms Maher, have suggested that pensions provision may have to be made mandatory if the 70 per cent target is to be reached.
The latest figures show that 60,605 employers had designated a PRSA provider for their staff by the end of March. This means that about 13,000 employers who are required by law to nominate a PRSA provider have yet to do so and could, as a consequence, be open to prosecution.
Within the firms that have already complied with the designation requirement, just 4,050 schemes have been activated by staff. This represents 12,464 workers, with a result that almost half of all active PRSAs are concentrated within just 2 per cent of Irish companies.
A Pensions Board analysis of a sample of non-compliant firms suggests that most of these are small companies employing fewer than 10 staff.
Ms Maher said the Board had so far investigated about 177 cases of suspected non-compliance, of which about 29 remained outstanding after being urged to change their stance.
The Pensions Board encourages members of the public to report firms that have not designated a PRSA provider. Almost 50 such "whistleblow" reports have been logged since last September.
