OPM Cuts Retirement Backlog

The Office of Personnel Management did better than it had projected in processing retirement claims last month, reducing its overall claims backlog to just more than 52,000.

In an announcement on its Twitter feed on Friday, OPM said it had processed 12,386 retirement claims in March, reducing the overall retirement claims backlog to 52,274.

In February, OPM Director John Berry told Senate lawmakers that eliminating the retirement claims backlog is his biggest priority in 2012, but noted that the agency does not yet have an IT plan to successfully tackle the backlog. OPM relies on data from other agencies to fully process retirement applications, but because most of that information is not automated, the agency is still "dealing with a paper and pencil process," Berry said.

In January, Berry also outlined a new plan for eliminating the claims backlog within 18 months. The plan emphasizes hiring more staff to process retirement claims, firing poor performers and incrementally upgrading technology to expedite payments.

On average, it takes 156 days for OPM to process a retirement claim, but many retirees wait much longer than that for their full annuity payments. OPM last year ended a large-scale IT modernization program that would have fully automated retirement claims processing after it failed to produce results.

Meanwhile, the agency also received a higher number of retirement claims than the number it had projected for March, keeping up with the trend that federal retirements are on the rise. OPM received 7,090 claims last month, much more than the 5,000 expected.

The agency also received higher-than-expected numbers of retirement claims in January and February. The agency is estimating 8,000 new claims will be filed in April.