Irish pensions are experiencing a "lot of problems", according to the chief executive of The Pensions Board.
Speaking on RTÉ's News at One, Brendan Kennedy said that there were issues with both defined benefit and defined contribution schemes.
Mr Kennedy said that trustees had been obliged to take steps to address shortfalls in defined benefit pensions.
These are pensions in which the final payment to contributors is defined from the beginning.
He was responding to questions about the shortfall in the defined benefit pension at Independent News and Media, which emerged last week.
Mr Kennedy said there was also an issue with defined contribution pensions. These are pensions in which the contributor's contribution is defined but the eventual benefit is not known until the pension is drawn down.
Mr Kennedy said that many people who are contributing to defined contribution pensions do not realise how much it will cost to fund them.
The Pensions Board also attacked what it described as poor pension administration.
In its 2012 Annual Report published today, the board said such poor record keeping could result in members not receiving all the benefits to which they were entitled.
Last year the body carried out 28 on-site investigations and discovered four cases which required remedial action.
Brendan Kennedy said: "It is extraordinary that any administrator should be so unaware of its responsibilities that this situation should arise."
He added: "The proportion of schemes where trustees have not fulfilled their legal responsibility is too high."
Mr Kennedy also expressed concern over defined benefit pension schemes, saying "the majority of such schemes have considerably less assets than are needed to meeting the funding standard".
This situation created a "substantial risk" that schemes would have nothing left by the time its younger members were retiring.
Mr Kennedy said the board continued to have concerns about "the understanding that some defined benefit trustees have of their role and responsibilities."
He also said that Irish pension schemes hold a higher proportion of equities than other comparable countries, which has been a major cause of current deficits in defined benefit schemes.
Meanwhile, Mr Kennedy said there was a continued fall in the number of members in Irish pension schemes, largely due to the poor economic situation.
He said that while this was not necessarily a surprise it was still "a cause for concern".
