Questions still waiting to be answered include the finer points of participant fees and potential legal liabilities for employers, but according to Katie Selenski, executive director of CalSavers, the Secure Choice investment board has approved final regulations and authorized its staff to search for a company to administer the program.

The regulations have been posted, with the staff intending to file them with the state's Office of Administrative Law within a month.

Once that's done, the rules will undergo an expedited review process known as emergency rulemaking, with the public having just 10 business days from the filing date to comment.

Selenski is quoted in the report saying, "Assuming there is no contest or protest that warrants a pause, the regulations would be in effect after the 10-day period," adding that a pilot program could start this fall, with a phased introduction, starting with larger employers, beginning early in 2019.

California will be the third state to set up its own auto-IRA for private-sector employees. Oregon started one last year and Illinois will before the end of the year. And while the self-employed can also opt into the program, California companies can't enroll out-of-state employees.

Workers who stick with the CalSavers program would have 5 percent of each paycheck automatically deposited into a Roth IRA, with those contributions automatically escalating annually by 1 percent till they hit a default of 8 percent.

Workers can also opt to contribute a different amount, or to open a regular IRA instead of a Roth.

California is proceeding with the plan despite the Trump administration's overturning of an Obama-era rule that exempted state-run auto-IRAs from ERISA.