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In remarks to pension officials from New York and several other states, Mr. Levitt, the longest-serving chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said their world was fraught with problems, including conflicts of interest, opaque accounting and a tendency among elected officials to promise valuable benefits, then fail to set aside enough money to pay for them.

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Mr. Levitt was speaking at an annual conference for public pension trustees sponsored by the Pacific Corporate Group, an investment management company that specializes in private equities.

He said he was speaking in the dual capacity of a private equities executive and the son of Arthur Levitt Sr., who was widely admired for refusing to use the New York State pension fund to bail out New York City during its fiscal crisis in the 1970s. Today, “too many fund trustees as well as elected officials” are “unable to carry this load,” he said.

Mr. Levitt said much of the trouble was rooted in pension accounting rules that “fail to reflect accurately” the cost of the benefits that public workers have earned or the value of the assets set aside to pay those benefits.

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