The U.S. government's Office of Personnel Management is making small tweaks to how it manages federal retirement programs after a failed attempt to modernize its system over the past seven years.
The OPM, which is the government's central human resources agency, administers the retirement program for federal employees and provides them with various benefits, such as health care. It began trying to automate some of its systems in 2005 to help it better manage the federal retirement program and make it easier for retirees to access their benefits.
According to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the agency's attempt to modernize its retirement system was plagued by inefficiencies and management problems and was scrapped in 2011 after six years of patches.
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In January 2012, OPM released a plan to improve retirement processing with targeted, incremental improvements rather than a large-scale modernization. The office has hired new claims-processing staff, taken steps to identify potential process improvements and has worked with other agencies to improve data quality.
It also has made information technology improvements that allow retirees to view the status of their accounts and has automated parts of the retirement application process. The plan is less ambitious than the agency's previous modernization goals and it doesn't address the necessary improvements or replacement of the legacy systems that support retirement processing, the GAO concluded.
That said, the agency's modernization efforts had many holes. The GAO found in 2005 that the office had defined the major components of its retirement modernization effort but had not identified the dependencies among them, increasing the risk that delays in one activity could have unforeseen impacts on the progress of others.
It also did not have a process for identifying and tracking project risks and mitigation strategies on a regular basis so it lacked a mechanism to address potential problems that could raise costs, lead to delays and otherwise hurt the modernization effort.
In 2009, the GAO reported that OPM continued to have problems in its modernization drive. OPM agreed with the GAO's recommendations and began to address them, but terminated the effort in February 2011.
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