During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to require employers who do not offer retirement plans to offer their workers access to automatic individual retirement accounts -- or IRAs -- with contributions via payroll deduction.

Here's the underlying idea: In order to encourage people to save for their retirement, the proposal would require that companies (other than the smallest firms) that don't offer other retirement plans such as 401(k)s to offer IRAs, with workers able to opt out if they wish.

Like a related promise on automatic 401(k) enrollment, the IRA proposal made it into Obama's 2010 budget outline. But it hasn't moved much further.

David John, a retirement-security specialist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, was one of the originators of the idea, which attracted bipartisan support. He said that the effort got sidetracked in part because congressional aides who were involved in it became deeply enmeshed in the health care debate. "Health care sucked out all the oxygen,” John said.

There are still some bills in Congress that would implement something along the lines of what Obama proposed. For instance, September 2011, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., offered the Automatic IRA Act of 2011. But it has not advanced to a hearing and has only secured one co-sponsor so far, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

John said that Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., is expected to offer a House version soon.

The Obama Administration has done one thing that sounds similar to this promise, but it's actually different. The administration is issuing rules to help interested employers automatically enroll employees in a retirement-saving account called a SIMPLE-IRA, with employees able to opt out. But SIMPLE-IRAs are not the standard IRAs referred to in this promise -- they are a variety of saving mechanism established during the Clinton Administration as a low-cost variant of the 401(k). They require an employer contribution, and as a result, they have never become widespread.

It's possible that this issue will gain traction again, though its chances of advancing in a polarized Congress during a presidential-election year do not seem high. If it does, we'll change our rating. But for now, we'll rate it a Promise Broken.