Lost in embrace of employer-backed plans is oversight.

The probe into trading abuses of mutual fund shares has touched a nerve in another part of the savings and investment system.

The investigation shows us worrisome trouble spots in 401(k) plans and other employer-sponsored retirement savings programs, which have grown faster over the past couple of decades than regulators' ability to keep up.

More than $1 trillion of the $7 trillion invested in U.S. mutual funds is employer-sponsored retirement-plan money, according to the Investment Company Institute. That pool is about five times as big as it was 10 years ago.

Much of the cash streaming into these plans every payday reaches the funds via intermediaries, where individual orders to buy or sell can effectively get lost in the crowd. That makes the 401(k)s prime ground for chicanery.

The Investment Company Institute trade association is studying a rule that would require all buy and sell orders for a given day to reach funds by 4 p.m. It also has proposed clearer regulation of intermediaries that collect orders from disparate sources such as individual members of a 401(k) plan.

That's a start. While we're on the subject of 401(k)s, it would be a great idea to take a broader look at the whole creaky creation.

Any discussion of the subject among financial planners brings head shaking, shoulder shrugging and rolling of the eyes. In many 401(k) plans, people routinely commit big sums of money to funds about which they know next to nothing.

They are supposed to get the same disclosure required in other types of fund investing accounts, starting with a prospectus. But a kind of bureaucratic standoff blocks the way. Fund firms and other companies with something to sell are limited in their ability to give information and/or advice to retirement-plan members, on the grounds that they aren't impartial.

Employers themselves, presumably free of any biases, are often neither able nor willing to do the job right. While independent businesses have sprung up to serve as impartial information sources, they haven't closed the whole gap.

And let us not forget fees. Funds themselves are required to disclose in great detail every fee they charge for management, administration and sales commissions. When is the last time you saw such fee disclosure from your 401(k) plan?

The 401(k) business goes on growing on its own lurching momentum. Researchers at T. Rowe Price say the average plan participant now has 13 funds to pick from, compared with two or four in the early days.

Choice is good, as they say--but only if investors know how to allocate assets using some better method than just picking individual funds by reputation or performance record. How wise, we might ask, are plan administrators in picking funds to put on the menu?

Early this year, President Bush proposed an overhaul of the U.S. savings system that would create a new series of savings vehicles including ERSAs, short for Employer Retirement Savings Accounts.

The country was busy with other pressing matters at the time, including impending war in Iraq and a separate program of tax cuts that wound up being enacted. So savings overhaul got shunted aside, though with some vows to raise the subject again next year.

By all means, bring it back! It may be the best way to rescue 401(k)s from their consider able problems, which give no promise of getting better on their own.

Chet Currier is a columnist with Bloomberg News.