Over the years, OPM has tried a number of different approaches including increasing staff and working to transition what is still often a paper-based process to a fully digital one. Image: Jat306/Shutterstock.com
Both the House and Senate versions of the general government spending bill that funds OPM call on that agency for renewed action on the longstanding issue of the length of the processing time before new federal retirees begin receiving their full benefits.
The Senate Appropriations Committee expressed its concerns about the “lengthy delays to process retirement and survivor claims and update health insurance benefits, as well as other critical changes that impact retirement benefits. These delays cause hardships for federal annuitants and their families.”
The House counterpart committee used virtually identical language, and both told OPM to continue posting monthly processing time data and to report to Congress on “the measures OPM is taking to decrease the processing delays and improve customer service levels, including the average time it takes a caller to reach an OPM operator and the number and percentage of unanswered calls.”
While OPM is working on an application to determine the exact annuity amount, new retirees receive interim payments, with the difference made up once the figure is finalized. Those payments are supposed to be for about 80 percent of an initial estimate but in some cases are far lower—and can continue for a number of months or even more than a year in some cases.
Separately, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, said that while the pending inventory is down from its early 2022 peak, more than two thirds of claims take longer than the target 60 days and of those the average was 142 days. “Congressional offices across the country are receiving high volumes of calls from concerned, and at times, desperate retirees,” he wrote.
“The frequency and volume of requests to me and my colleagues illustrate that OPM is failing to deliver on a basic promise it has made to our civil servants. I cannot help but imagine that for every one person who calls a Congressional office, there are countless others who suffer in silence. The delays in both response and in processing of retirement applications result in genuine difficulty for constituents and, too often, financial harm,” he wrote in asking for information about OPM’s actions to date and its plans for the future.
More than a dozen House and Senate Democrats sent a similar letter several months ago, and around the same time several Republican members of the House counterpart committee pressed OPM director Kiran Ahuja on the issue.
Over the years, OPM has tried a number of different approaches including increasing staff and working to transition what is still often a paper-based process to a fully digital one. It also has put out several sets of guidance for both retiring employees and their agencies on making sure that applications do not contain errors or omissions that can slow down the process—guidance that some have interpreted as attempting to shift the blame.
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