OPM has told agencies to send information on their calendar year 2015 use of student loan reimbursements as a recruiting and retention tool, in preparation for its next annual report on those payments.
Under the program, an agency can pay an employee up to $10,000 a year and up to $60,000 lifetime to be used pay off certain types of student loans.
OPM wants information department-wide or agency-wide by March 31 on the numbers of recipients; the pay plan, occupational series, and job title of each; and the total dollar amounts paid out. Those that did not provide any payments are specify whether they have established, are in the process of establishing, or do not intend to establish, a student loan repayment program.
“We invite you to share any additional information regarding best practices, lessons learned, program effectiveness, metrics used to measure program success, establishing a business case, program impediments, or other relevant details about your agency’s use of student loan repayments as a recruitment or retention tool. In addition, we encourage you to identify any ways to improve the student loan repayment program,” the call memo says.
The report covering 2014, released last October, showed that use of the program increased to 8,469 payments worth $58.7 million total after dropping—in both dollar terms and number of recipients—each year over 2010-2013. However, only 33 agencies used the authority out of the 83 responding, and five–Justice, DoD, State, SEC and VA—accounted for 80 percent of the payout.
