The Office of Personnel Management is still facing several long-standing management challenges, but one challenge in particular has been knocked off the latest list from OPM’s inspector general office.
Due to “continued improvements,” the federal retirement claims processing backlog at OPM is no longer a top management challenge for the agency, OPM IG Krista Boyd wrote in an Oct. 1 report.
After several years of a heightened federal retirement claims backlog, the new IG report noted that OPM is now closing in on its goal of bringing its average time for processing a retirement claim below 60 days. As of August, the most recent data currently available, OPM decreased its average processing time to 64 days, and had an inventory of 15,178 pending claims from retiring federal employees.
The some 15,000 pending claims put OPM over its “steady state” goal of a 13,000-claim inventory at any given time. But it’s still the lowest number of claims the agency has seen in two years. In comparison, in October 2022, OPM had 25,227 pending claims in its federal retirement inventory — over 10,000 above the current levels.