The Irish Pensions Authority (IPA) has published its Annual Report and Accounts for 2022, detailing its regulatory activity, financial results, and objectives.

The report also contained a statement from the Pensions Regulator, Brian Kennedy, who noted that “by far the most significant current pensions issue” was the implementation of the IORP II Directive.

He stated that considerable progress had been made, and many schemes had decided that it was not practical or financially viable to become compliant, and they had decided to move their pension provision to a master trust or Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA).

This has resulted in, for the first time, the number of Irish pension schemes beginning to fall.

“The number of new pension schemes being created has fallen from a typical average of over 1,000 schemes per month almost to zero and existing schemes are closing in increasing numbers as their benefits and contributions are moved elsewhere,” Kennedy said.

He added that the authority expected the remaining group schemes to achieve compliance with IORP II by the end of the year and its focus will turn to considering enforcement action against trustees of non-compliant schemes.

Single-member schemes have until April 2026 to become compliant.

The IPA is now obliged to apply a system of ‘forward-looking risk-based’ supervision to pension schemes, and its supervisory review process will be implemented in the coming months and years as the IORP II transition is completed.

While there has been an “understandable focus” on IORP II, Kennedy also detailed several other “important issues”, including learning lessons from the gilts crisis in the UK last autumn, pension investment in unlisted unregulated assets and whether this is appropriate in all cases, and the increase in the number of new PRSA contracts shining a spotlight on investment rules governing PRSAs.

“The objective of the work of the IPA is to improve consumer protection for members and beneficiaries, who have the right to expect the same standards from their pension schemes as they expect from any other institution with which they might be saving,” Kennedy stated.

“Progress has been made in recent years, but there is further work to be done.”

During the year, the IPA opened 15 new investigations, while it finalised and closed 17 investigations and concluded five prosecution cases.

It held 19 engagement meeting with the trustee boards of master trusts, and eight with the trustee boards of defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution schemes.

Of the 534 DB schemes subject to the funding standard, 499 satisfied the standard at 31 December 2022.

All but five of the remaining 35 DB schemes have funding proposals or are in the process of submitting funding proposals.

The authority stated that it will directly engage with any scheme that fails to submit a funding proposal.

Ten registered administrators were audited for compliance, more than 305,000 data submissions were processed through the IPA’s Pensions Data Register, and over 11,000 pension queries, general pension and data processing queries were received and dealt with during the year.

The IPA’s report revealed that its income in 2022 totalled €11.3m and its expenditure was €10.3m, resulting in a €1m surplus.

Its revenue reserve increased from €5.13m to €6.16m between the end of December 2021 and the end of December 2022.

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