The Office of Personnel Management is expected to release new retirement statements. John Berry, the Director of OPM, said that the glitches in the system that affected as many as 12,000 retirees would be revised by sometime in mid-April.Currently, with the paper system that is in place it can take anywhere from 5-40 business days to finish an annuity calculation request. OPM is testing a new system that will not have to be done manually.
According to GovExec, Daniel Adcock, the legislative director for the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said, “I think the reason why it’s such a complex problem is that frequently, federal employees may have worked at a bunch of different agencies.â€
The total cost of the upgrade to an electronic system could not be predicted, but the system in place is in dire need of revision. It is predicted to take more than a year to be fully functional.
It seems as though the federal retirement and FEHB programs have outgrown the OPM and should be transferred or re-established in a separate agency/corporation. The OPM needs to get its house in order and get back to its primary mission which is in need of attention – fixing the “broken” federal employment process. But just about every other federal personnel program needs attention, as in oversight, corrective action, consistency, etc. Federal pay for example has become highly politicized based on gossip, hearsay and innuendo. The OPM could have stoped this early on but chose to do what continues to do – nothing. Stop hiring CPAs and MBAs at the OPM and start hiring SMEs.