By Stephen Barr
Thursday, April 3, 2008; D04

For a member of Congress, there's nothing better than using an agency's own data to make your point about it.

That was the case yesterday at a House hearing on the fiscal 2009 budget request by the Office of Personnel Management. Rep. Jos� E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), who is chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee and is interested in promoting diversity, cited a 2007 survey that the OPM had conducted of its employees.

About 25 percent of the OPM employees chose to "neither agree nor disagree" on whether OPM policies and programs promote diversity in the agency, and an additional 12 percent selected "do not know" as their response. An additional 9.4 percent disagreed that the OPM's efforts promote diversity in the agency.

With the OPM director, Linda M. Springer, at the witness table, Serrano asked what the OPM is doing to ensure that its employees are aware of the government's commitment to creating a workplace that reflects the diversity of the nation.

Springer said that the OPM holds an event every month to champion diversity efforts and that she has taken diversity into account when hiring employees. Still, she acknowledged, "We need to do more than what we are doing."

Serrano, who heads the House Appropriations financial services and general government subcommittee, is not alone in his interest in promoting the recruitment of minorities and women by the government. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), chairman of the House federal workforce subcommittee, scheduled a hearing for this afternoon on a bill that would emphasize the importance of diversity in the ranks of federal executives.

Federal employment data show that the government lags behind the private sector in the hiring of women and Hispanics and needs to do a better job of providing opportunities for minorities to enter the government's top management ranks.

Springer said progress has been made in hiring more women and Hispanics, but she called it "very modest." The OPM, which oversees the civil service system, encourages agencies to report on hiring and training initiatives to improve the representation of minorities across the government, she said.

Much of yesterday's hearing focused on the OPM's request for $15.2 million for continuation of a rollout of a new electronic retirement system.

Springer said the new system, called RetireEZ, has processed 34 retirement requests since its launch in February. The system successfully tested 15 of the most common retirement calculations, and the OPM plans to add and monitor 100 more such functions by early June, she said.

About 26,000 federal employees, who are paid through the General Services Administration, are in the first phase of RetireEZ. The U.S. Postal Service, with about 700,000 employees, will join the retirement modernization project next. The OPM expects that about 2,000 postal employees will file retirement claims every month and that will provide a better sense of how the new system functions, Springer said.

The new system will permit the OPM to move out of a labor-intensive, paper-based system for calculating pensions. In years past, most government employees have received a partial annuity because agencies and the OPM had to pull together paper personnel records, a process that sometimes takes months.

The switch to an automated system will permit the OPM to make full and correct pension payments within days of retirement and, when the project is completed, allow employees to go online and run their own calculations to get a sense of what they will receive in retirement.

Until all defects and bugs are discovered and fixed in the automated system, Springer plans to keep the old method of figuring pension payments in operation as a safeguard. That legacy process will probably end in 2010, after the last parts of the government are moved into the electronic system, Springer said.

The Bush administration has recommended that the OPM receive $20 billion in funding for fiscal 2009. Of that, $19.8 billion would finance mandatory programs such as retirement and health care for government employees. That leaves $228.9 million for salaries and programs at OPM, about $15 million less than the agency received for this fiscal year.

Serrano suggested that the OPM is not alone in facing a possible budget cut. "Unfortunately, the president's discretionary budget request across most government agencies falls short of providing the resources that are needed to ensure a strong federal workforce. This troubles me because I believe this budget lacks the recognition that we must invest in a strong federal workforce now in order to avoid costly problems in the future."

Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.