President Bush signed a bill Tuesday to ease pension-funding rules for companies and give retirees a reprieve from required withdrawals from their tax-advantaged investment accounts.

The bill was a compromise reached late in the second lame-duck session of Congress after senators agreed to drop tax and tribal-pension provisions they had sought. The bill was cleared by voice vote in the Senate on Dec. 11, a day after the House passed the measure, also by voice vote.

Bush signed the measure despite concerns that it could force more obligations onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

“Our concerns with the legislation remain, but we do believe that in this current economic environment and current economic circumstances, that the benefits of the legislation outweighed our objections,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto said Tuesday morning.

The core of the bill would address a problem that corporations have been warning about since the economic recession deepened this year.

Under the 2006 pension law overhaul, companies with defined-benefit plans that aren’t fully funded must begin meeting that goal soon. But the 2008 stock market plunge has decimated the investments of many pension plans, and corporations argue that meeting the law’s funding requirements now would take so much money from corporate budgets it could prevent companies from hiring and investing and could even force layoffs.

The bill also would impose a one-year moratorium on the required minimum annual distributions from tax-deferred retirement accounts of individuals 70-1/2 years old or older, echoing a proposal from President-elect Barack Obama . That change applies to 2009, but it does not change the required distributions for 2008.