By the end of May OPM's backlog of pending retirement claims had fallen to 14,035, its lowest tally since 2016. Nora Carol Photography / Getty Images
OPM’s retirement backlog hit an 8-year low last month
Efforts to streamline the processing of departing federal workers’ retirement applications continue to pay dividends, as the inventory of pending claims hit the lowest point since 2016.
The government’s backlog of pending retirement claims from federal workers hit an eight-year low last month.
The Office of Personnel Management’s retirement process and subsequent backlog has long dogged the federal government’s HR agency, frustrating agencies and departing federal employees alike, in large part due to paper-based legacy personnel systems.
But last year, OPM instituted a number of measures to try to make immediate improvements to the process, including dedicating more resources and manpower during the early-year busy season for retirement claims and setting up a new dashboard for claimants to better understand the process and avoid common pitfalls.
In May, OPM received 6,751 new retirement applications, a slight decrease from the 6,901 it received the previous month. But after a modest decrease in the number of claims actually processed in April, the agency increased its pace again last month, processing 8,793 claims.
By the end of the month, the backlog had fallen to 14,035, compared to 16,077 pending claims at the end of April. That marks the smallest retirement backlog OPM has experienced since May 2016, when it also finished the month with a backlog of 14,035 applications.
After a brief spike in the average time it takes for OPM to process a retirement request as measured on a monthly basis in April—moving from 55 days in March to 61—that metric dipped slightly again last month, ending May with an 60-day processing average. The figure, as calculated since the beginning of the fiscal year last October, has remained static at 61 days.