Federal retirees are likely going to wait longer for their claims to be processed.
The federal government’s retirement backlog surged in October, with the backlog of claims hitting the highest level since March 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) received 20,344 new retirement claims in October. That’s nearly 8,000 more than OPM received in September. It came during a government shutdown and just after the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) ended for thousands of workers on September 30. The backlog is now approaching 35,000 after being whittled down close to OPM’s goal of no more than 13,000 pending claims a month. Claim processing speed also slowed to 79 days on average.
What’s causing this?
Retirement experts point to a perfect storm of rising claims due to deferred resignation programs and voluntary retirements, fewer employees to process such claims, and the launch of the new digital Online Retirement Application (ORA) from OPM.
Retirees are running into logjams, and customer complaints are rising. Before retirement applications can even be submitted to OPM for processing, the employee must complete the ORA and have it approved by agency HR.
“They’re finding that a lot of the HR departments are just simply overwhelmed. We had a lot of people that were leaving, we have bottlenecking of a lot people that are leaving on DRP as well, and so they just can’t provide the kind of support that they used to before,” said Thiago Glieger, Retirement Planning Expert with RMG Advisors to Federal News Network.
And Glieger warns that any efficiency gained by moving to an online process is still a distance away.
“Right now there’s a lot of moving parts that have to come together for all of that efficiency to really start showing up,” said Glieger.
OPM Director Scott Kupor believes a fully automated retirement process is about six months away.
Director Kupor noted that even with the ORA system, human workers still check the information and must manually input information in a number of cases. He says that introduces “a huge amount of delay in the system” and is something the agency is working to fix to go paperless “as quickly as possible.”
New Retirement Tools
OPM also announced two new online tools to support federal retirees that allow federal retirees to do the following:
· Securely download their 1099-R tax forms without logging into Retirement Services Online, offering a faster, paperless option for accessing tax documents.
· View current retirement processing times to better understand the expected timeline for the completion of their retirement benefit applications.
OPM says more enhancements to online retirement services are expected in the coming months as part of the agency’s ongoing modernization initiative.
