The Office of Personnel Management has taken a step to address the more immediate concerns of retiring federal employees, ahead of the agency’s long-term efforts to modernize retirement services.
A new “Quick Guide to Retirement,” released Monday by the OPM, aims to help federal employees and recent retirees better understand and navigate the current federal retirement process.
“It’s a need right now,” Lori Amos, the OPM’s deputy deputy director for pension services, told reporters on Monday. “This is our current situation…
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The Office of Personnel Management has taken a step to address the more immediate concerns of retiring federal employees, ahead of the agency’s long-term efforts to modernize retirement services.
A new “Quick Guide to Retirement,” released Monday by the OPM, aims to help federal employees and recent retirees better understand and navigate the current federal retirement process.
“It’s a need right now,” Lori Amos, the OPM’s deputy deputy director for pension services, told reporters on Monday. “That’s our current state — we’re on paper. We have to manage expectations, we have to provide information to our clients, because we don’t want them to worry about paying their pensions. It’s for today.”
The OPM’s Retirement Services Division, the office through which all federal employees must eventually apply for retirement, has often been criticized for long wait times to process retirement applications and clumsy computer systems. Currently, it takes an average of three to five months for the OPM to process a pension application, from the official retirement date of an employee to the date of the first pension deposit into the account. individual bank. In the most extreme cases, federal employees may have to wait a year or more before receiving their first retirement deposit.
Although it does not offer a definitive improvement in processing time itself, the new OPM guidance is intended to help federal authorities get a clearer picture and timeline of the process, to help ease their transition to retirement. With the new guide, the OPM said it hopes to proactively answer some of the most common questions about federal retirement, including “what’s the status of my retirement application?” said Amos.
Amos said the end goal of the new retirement guide is to reduce errors in applications and, by extension, to reduce the processing time for retirement applications, as well as the backlog of pending retirement applications at the ‘OPM. The pension backlog at OPM is declining, but still stands more than 7,000 cases above the agency’s target of 13,000 pending applications.
“The guide tells candidates exactly what they need. Or it gives them links to information so they know what they need. They will know what forms they need to fill out. They will know which forms require a digital signature,” Amos said. “What we’re trying to do is bring together the information that we’ve made available on the website. This is essential information that we need, so that we have a complete package when (the application) reaches OPM.
What’s in the Quick Guide?
In the guide, federal employees can see an overview of the steps they need to take before retirement, as well as links to more information about different benefit options and factors that can delay retirement processing. Some of the most common reasons for a delay are missing signatures or missing forms, especially if a retiree has worked at several different agencies during their career.
The guide also explains each step of the process from OPM’s perspective and what happens to an application at each step. Federal employees will also find a list of links to more information, including an overview of BENEFEDS, handbooks for CSRS and FERS retirement, and a phone number to contact the OPM Retirement Support Center. The guide combines and condenses information that was previously found on several different pages of the OPM website. OPM developed the guide by considering the most common questions asked by potential retirees, conducting focus groups, and gathering feedback from recent retirees and benefits officers on retirement processing.
“What we learned in developing the guide is that most claimants don’t understand where their case is in the process or who has the case. They think the deal is here with OPM, but in the first 30 or 45 days it’s still with their agency and the pay centers,” Amos said. “As we were receiving the applications, we recognized that there was a need for federal employees, those planning for retirement, so that they could plan ahead. This is information they need to know before submitting this application.
Amos said she hopes the guide will help employees understand on a more specific level who to contact with questions, based on their job application timeline.
“What I hope is that now we have connected the dots between the three main tracks of this process – the agency, the employee and the OPM,” Amos said.
The National Association of Active and Retired Federal Employees (NARFE), an advocacy group focused in part on retirement services for federal employees, said the OPM’s new guide is a step in the right direction. This will likely help reduce confusion and uncertainty for retiring applicants, and may also reduce calls to the OPM from applicants seeking answers about the status of their applications, John said. Hatton, NARFE’s staff vice president for policy and programs.
With additional time and resources likely to become available, Hatton said he hopes the OPM will turn its attention to the larger issues of pension services and go beyond simply improving communication around the current situation. Beyond an overview of the retirement process, Hatton said the OPM should develop case tracking systems to communicate progress as it occurs – an effort that would prove more useful in the long run.
“Rather than accepting long processing times, we encourage process improvements and modernization, such as the use of an online retirement application integrated with OPM processing systems, to reduce them,” Hatton said. at Federal News Network.
The OPM plans to update the new guide every month. But to be able to provide real-time updates on the status of pension applications, the agency should review and modernize the pension services system.
“We don’t have the system to be able to provide real-time status of individual cases — we’re still a paper-based process,” Amos said. “Until we modernize and have a case management system where we can electronically track where cases are, we won’t be able to provide a unique real-time status for each case.
More pension service plans on the horizon
Beyond this more immediate response to some of the common issues of retiring federal employees, the OPM is making longer-term efforts to modernize retirement services as a whole. OPM’s FY2024 budget request includes increased funding for pension services, to address legacy IT and make large-scale changes.
OPM Chief Information Officer Guy Cavallo plans to tackle IT modernization in small bites. He said there will be a clearer plan for pension services in the agency’s next IT strategy for fiscal year 2023 to 2026.
In the meantime, OPM has made other recent updates to pension services to try and reduce the pension backlog. The agency added a chatbot allowing users to ask and get answers to common questions, and increased the staffing of its call centers for pension services.
Once new modernization efforts begin to take effect, OPM may update the guide to reflect the changes – but details of this are still pending.
“Once we start embarking on this IT modernization effort, we don’t know what this guide will look like. If automated, that form itself could be digitized,” Amos said. “That is yet to be determined, but hopefully once our customers get used to using this guide and the information in it, we can somehow incorporate it into our future state.”