OPM awards third Retirement Systems Modernization contract

The Office of Personnel Management has selected Integic, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, to digitize employee retirement records and help bring federal retirement benefits processing into the 21st century.

The Northrop Grumman subsidiary is based in Chantilly, Va. OPM estimated the three-month base contract and the first option year at $12.8 million. The second option year, if awarded, will cost the government an additional $14.5 million.

Linda Springer, OPM’s director, has described the digitization contract as the third leg of a three-legged stool necessary for modernizing an antiquated paper-based system and providing more accurate and timely retirement benefits to more than 1 million current and former federal employees who have not yet retired.

The agency now stores all federal retirement benefits documents inside a mountain in Boyers, Pa. The document file cabinets, if laid end-to-end, would go from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore and start to come back, an OPM official said in February while giving details of the modernization project.

Earlier this year, OPM awarded two other contracts as part of the retirement systems modernization project. Hewitt Associates won a 10-year, $290 million performance-based contract to process federal retirement claims electronically. Accenture received a $40 million contract for business transformation and information technology services.