Most small business owners surveyed by the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS), a trade association for more than 500 public sector pension funds in the United States and Canada, want to provide their employees with some sort of retirement plan. In fact, 82% support the concept of a new retirement plan that would provide employees with a guaranteed monthly benefit for life after they leave the work world. What’s more, more than two-thirds say they would be interested in adopting such a plan for their own businesses, according to Employee Benefit News.

At the same time, just one in five small business owners surveyed offer employees a 401(k) or other employee self-funded retirement plan, a recent survey by Nationwide found.

To be sure, NCPERS has a stake in this game, having introduced its Secure Choice pension plan in September. “Secure Choice Pension (SCP) is designed as a public–private enterprise for those who currently do not have a pension (particularly for small and mid-sized businesses),” NCPERS said in a white paper. As envisioned by NCPERS, each state would establish its own SCP, which would be administered by a board of trustees of public and private representatives. Private sector employers could join an SCP, thus allowing their employees to participate. Both the participating employers and employees would make regular contributions to the SCP. The plan would provide participants the benefits of lower costs – a result of the efficiencies available to large pension plans, according to NCPERS.

Small businesses interested in providing their employees with a pension also might benefit from a bill introduced in the House in early December by Ron Kind (D-WI) and co-sponsored by Jim Gerlach (R-PA) and Richard Neal (D-MA). The Small Business Pension Promotion Act of 2011 (H.R. 3561) would amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to reduce administrative burdens and encourage retirement plan formation and retention.

The American Benefits Council has issued a graph showing the most significant differences between current regulations and those proposed under the bill. For instance H.R. 3561 would allow self-employed individuals to deduct from their income contributions to a qualified retirement plan, other than elective deferrals. Currently, an employee’s wages for payroll tax purposes do not include contributions his or her employer makes to a qualified retirement plan. However, self-employed individuals can’t make this deduction. In addition, IRS code section 4972 imposes on employers a 10% excise tax for some nondeductible contributions to retirement plans. H.R. 3561 would repeal the tax, which might encourage employers to contribute more to their retirement plans when times are good.

H.R. 3561 has been referred to the Committee on Ways and Means, as well as the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Earlier this year, Kind also introduced The SAVE Act of 2011; SAVE stands for Small Businesses Add Value for Employees. This would amend the Internal Revenue Code to, among other things, repeal certain restrictions on rollovers from simple IRAs, increase the tax credit for small employer pension plan startup costs, and establish multiple small employer retirement plans that provide for automatic employee contributions. The bill, H.R. 1534, is with the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions.