A report in The Washington Post on Sunday examined how the Office of Personnel Management processes the retirement claims for federal workers by hand, on paper, hundreds of feet below ground in a former Pennsylvania mine. The system sounds inefficient and outdated, not to mention strange, right?
Perhaps that’s why OPM Director Katherine Archuleta on Monday published an article on her blog touting the agency’s progress in reducing the claims backlog and noting that it is gradually transitioning to a fully digital process. She titled the piece “Retirement processing is on the move.”
“While OPM has made progress, I will work closely with leadership and employees to continue to improve the services that our customers deserve and expect,” Archuleta said. “We are working to prioritize claims processing, customer service, and IT modernization, including the development of a case management system for retirement services.”
The director said OPM has reduced the claims inventory by 71 percent since the backlog reached a peak of 61,108 cases in January 2012. She also said the average time to process a new retirement claim was 61 days in February, down from 91 days in July of 2013 and 156 days in December 2011.
Check out the full article from Archuleta for more details.
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