It points out that EU rules mean deficits are not allowed in defined benefit schemes which cross national borders.
For example, the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) will provide some new protection for members of private sector defined benefit schemes, where the employer is insolvent and the scheme is under-funded.
The letter - written by the Charity Finance Group, National Council for Voluntary Organisations and the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action - expressed concern for up to 5, 000 UK charities in "multi-employer defined benefit schemes".
But both venerable British savings institutions are in the decline in the UK. There are some who believe that most defined benefit schemes will be wound up within half a century, so they're unlikely to be buyers of debt that will outlive them.
Companies have also, sensibly, been switching from defined-benefit schemes, under which the company bears the risk of maintaining pension payments, to defined-contribution plans, in which the risk lies with individual pensioners.
If that continues, companies will surely become even more reluctant to stick with their defined-benefit schemes.
In 1995 some 5m private employees were building up entitlements in defined-benefit schemes open to new members.
Once women began to work, typically part-time, and once employees began to switch jobs, defined-benefit schemes became inequitable.
The biggest setback has been in private defined-benefit schemes, which pay pensions linked to years of service and final salaries.
Legislation eventually righted some of those wrongs, but defined-benefit schemes are not well suited to the pattern of many people's lives.
Most defined-benefit schemes have either a set retirement age or a mandatory number of contribution years before a full pension can be drawn.
Although some firms may dip into profits to plug newly exposed gaps, many more will continue the trend of junking defined-benefit schemes altogether.
That is already happening, with the decline of companies' defined-benefit schemes.
For companies, defined-benefit schemes force an impossible choice.
The IFS estimates that employer-sponsored pensions are twice as common, and also more generous, among state employees than in the private sector, where defined-benefit schemes of the kind the government wants to curtail are becoming increasingly rare.
The rising burden of defined-benefit schemes is forcing some firms to restrict them to existing staff and to put new recruits into new, defined-contribution schemes, thereby transferring to the employee the risk of low investment returns in the future.
If so, more firms than ever will close their defined-benefit schemes (in America, only about a fifth of all workers are covered by one now) and the investment risk inherent in saving for retirement will fall on the untrained individual.
ESOPs are, by and large, more likely to offer employees traditional, defined-benefit pension schemes, which insulate workers from the vagaries of share-price movements.
And how would EU solvency requirements for defined benefit and hybrid pensions schemes be met across the UK if Scotland became an independent country?
Final-salary, or defined-benefit (DB), schemes are in place for long-serving workers.
Defined-benefit pension funds are anyway being consigned to the dustbin, in favour of defined-contribution schemes.
Many companies have abandoned final-salary or defined-benefit (DB) pensions for new staff and switched to defined-contribution (DC) schemes, in large part because of the high cost of the former.
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