EDITH CHAMBERS
Edith Chambers is a prolific writer with a lot of experience in the federal retirement paradigm. Her excellence and insight of the field is second to none and her verdict is considered very legitimate when it comes to political arguments.
Get Your Hands On Retirement Benefits Sooner
Get Your Hands on Retirement Benefits
With the passing of every year, you see your old age draw closer to you and if you haven’t got yourself covered with a fancy retirement plan, the years are going to be very hard for you to foresee. The federal officers can know play a part in lessening the time it takes to get their retirement benefits applications processed. The person that is overlooking the whole process has long been stressing on the fact that the soon to be retirees should start looking at their whole work experience and history before they actually consider retirement.
The last thing you want at the time of retirement is to realize that your documents are not complete and that your records are not substantially astute. Ken Zawodny, the director of the retirement services at the commission further said that if he were to retire within a year, he would be lagging behind the curve. He said that a prospective retiree should be paying heed to their records for more than 3 years ago even and trying to make sure that none of their service years are found missing. This includes letting the HR of your company has a hold of all the information that they would need.
Apart from the usual retirement benefits, the employees should do well by giving some thought to insurance coverage and other such matters. Thrift savings plan funding and benefit issues are to be given special attention before you decide on commencing your service.
A study that was released a few weeks ago shows that 75 percent of the time, the employees that have recently retired will get their applications processed within a period of 60 days after sending it to OPM but strikingly, agencies haven’t been able to completely be able to approve even 90 % of all the applicant’s records.
Upon retirement of federal officers, the agencies are responsible for forwarding the applications and records to OPM where all the benefits are calculated. So, it’s highly recommended that you start considering your post-retirement life by looking at your records straight away.
October Saw TSP Stock Funds Get Gains
TSP Stock Funds Get See Gains
Majority of the Thrift Savings plan funds saw huge rises in the preceding month of October. The fund that got the largest boost was the C fund. This was hugely unexpected but the commission that approved the change justified its decision and when you really look at it, it does have excellent effects for the federal employees in the longer term.
The C fund is based on the S&P 500 index. Specifically this index saw a whopping raise of 8.4 percent in the month of October. The index has not seen a higher raise in the past 4 years which is something really striking. One more surprising fact is that the C fund was actually able to even exceed its index rate and gained 8.46 percent for the month of October. This also means that the C fund is now going to be at 2.8 (round about) for the year and for the last 12 months it stands at 5.28 percent.
This gain in the C fund is something that’s going to be written in the history books. October 2011 saw the C fund gain around 11 percent and since then, no year saw the C fund get a raise this high.
Apart from the C fund, other smaller TSP stock funds also saw gains in the preceding month. The S fund, for instance increased by 5.612 percent but it’s still down for the whole year. These tinier funds play a more vital part to the domestic economy of the country and because of the fact that the economy is not getting rapid growth, there is expectedly less chances for these funds to gain growth in their revenue. That is the reason why they are behind the C fund by a substantial amount.
Other funds like the G fund also saw changes and this just goes to show the importance of the month of October in the domestic economic life of the country.
Should Public Housing Smoking Be Banned?
Public Housing Smoking Ban
There are many ways we can look at one single matter. The federal smoking ban that prohibits the smoking of cigarettes in public housing has a very clear theme: Smoking is indeed something that’s injurious to health and when you ban the use of it in public, it can only be for the good. When it comes to housing, many landlords already prohibit the usage of cigarettes within the premises because not only is it bad for health but as we all know, it’s also a fire hazard. The federal government also agrees with the landlords on this matter and most of the members of senate find it highly plausible to approve the federal smoking ban.
Having said that, this ban is going to affect over a million public housing units across the country and it would also include its implementation in over 3 thousand housing agencies within a period of 1 and a half years. So all things considered, is this ban the right move to make? Let’s analyze:
How is banning public housing smoking good?
The first point worth raising is that it would definitely save the government a lot of money. A study done by CDC in 2014 revealed that if there was no smoking in public housing, it would mean an annual yield of over a hundred and fifty million.
Another reason why it should be considered a positive step is that over 500 thousand public housing schemes are laden with elderly people. Apart from this, the number of children living is such projects is remarkably high too. This makes them protected from the menace of smoke.
How is public housing smoking bad?
The plan is not funded and the owners would have to incur the costs for implementing this ban themselves.
Another reason worth mentioning is that there is no such law that will protect the landowners if they fail to make sure that the inhabitants of the housing schemes quit smoking. So is it worth the risk?
All being said, the government should micro-analyze before taking a step in any direction with respect to this ban.
Set Up Your Own Retirement Plan
How to Set Up Your Retirement Plan
We strive all our lives to make money that we spend living our lives in the best way we can. Preparing for the future is something that most of us fail to do because we lack prudence and that is the reason why almost 60 percent of American employees that are still in service have got no retirement funds registered against their names. Thankfully for all of us though, the government has something in store for us.
The myRA plan is a free savings benefit plan that is completely devoid of any type of risks and is destined to help the people that have no other retirement plans like the IRAs. This particular plan can be opened by all of the government employees without having to spend a single dollar, it’s also portable from one job to another and there is no fee whatsoever associated to it either.
The account holders that have an accumulative income of less than 130 thousand annually can pile up to 6000 annually for 2015 with just 1 percent contributions. This account is going to prove as a step in the right direction and could be used as a stepping stone. There are some things about it worth noting down though: You can have a maximum of 15 thousand deposited and it will last for 30 years before you would have to transfer your funds to another bank account.
Many critics and magazines have regarded this as an excellent step taken by the government because post-retirement poverty has always been an issue in our country and it was high time that it got taken care of. A point worth raising here is that the employees that already have excellent retirement plans can also benefit from this retirement plan if they desire although the options available to them are a lot better.
Federal Employees Would Pay More For Pension Benefits
Federal Employees Would Pay More For Pension Benefits
A newly raised House bill will make the federal employees of the state pay a considerably larger amount for their future pension benefits. This has received polar critiques from different members but its aim is to relieve the employees of getting their assets confiscated and in turn adding strength to their Medicare and social security.
Scott Rigell is the person who has raised voice and legislated the bill that would help in the restoration of around 3/4th of the spending cuts that get added to the non-defense as well as the defense budgets. This will also ensure that a substantial amount of money is added to the pays that get contributed to the pension funds of the feds that attained office before 2014. Put in simpler and clearer words, once this bill gets passed (which is more than likely) the percentages of contribution that the federal officers (hired in 2014 or later) have to currently give to the federal workers that come under the Federal Employee retirement system will get applied to everyone.
Many federal employees are in support of this bill even when they would now have to pay more towards their pension benefits. The majority pays around 0.8 percent but now it’s expected to go to as much as a staggering 4.4 percent.
The Bipartisan budget act was drafted by Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray in 2013 and according to it, the federal employees of 2014 or later would have to part with 4.4 % of their incomes to accumulate as later pensions and the ones that got employed after 2012 would have to pay a little less i.e. 3.1 percent. The rest would just have to pay 0.8 percent.
Now, after Scott’s bill gets passed, all of the employees would have to pay around 4.4 percent to get included in their pension funds. Whether this move is going to end up being positive or not, we shall wait and see.
Is ID Theft Protection a Fundamental Federal Employee Right?
ID theft is a heinous crime but sadly it’s something that happens every now and again to all sorts of people.
It’s expected that the monitoring of credit can be made a rudimentary/fundamental right for all the federal employees just like medical insurance. This can happen if the office of personnel management accepts a proposition made by some officials of the White House. Unexpectedly, many of the feds have recently been hacked and are expecting the OPM management to give this matter the required attention.
A cyber security strategy was released by the President’s personnel last week after a plethora of data and security breaches went unnoticed, capped off by the 21.5 million investigation files’ breach. This is expected to run government wide.
The office of management and budget’s 21 page issue directs OPM to allow federal employees to enjoy identity theft protection as a fundamental perk and unexpectedly the directive has received a lot of praise. This directive has asked OPM to take actions within the next three months by reviewing and analyzing everything and ultimately delivering the recommendations the office of Management and budget made.
It would not be wrong to say that the OPM is considering this viable. They have expressed their feelings by saying that previous victims of compromised identity and data have showed a great interest in these recommendations. They are currently working with an interagency team to propose a plan to OMB and finally award the feds with identity protection benefits. The officials a few months back also allotted three ID-tracking service providers to help the breach victims overcome any further hacks. It’s still unclear whether these services will be provided free to everyone or as an option to people who want to protect themselves. No matter what the final decision might be, this surely looks like something the feds would love.
Federal Employees Receive Boost in Pay
Due to the newly published rules that will give rise to the 13 new locality pay areas thereby expanding the prevalent ones in the process too, around a million federal employees will get their hands on an extraordinary pay rise come January!
This general schedule pay system is applicable to the incomes of around 1.6 million federal employees that are currently pursuing their careers in the white collar occupations below the senior-most designations. As already known, there are separate pay systems for officers at executive and other senior positions. The blue collar employees also share a different pay system.
The general locality pay system takes the location of employment as an input and not the location of residence of the officer. This results in a difference in income based on different locations but for the same job. For Alaska and Hawaii, there are currently around 30 city areas, not inclusive of the separate small localities. “Rest of the US” or RUS is composite of all the rest of the localities.
If an officer moves from a RUS locality this could in turn mean a pay boost since generally it is considered the least paid locality. For instance, a normal income for an officer at GS-13’s first level point is around 80,000 in the RUS locality but around 90 thousand in the Baltimore locality. Another worth-highlighting point here is that in the highest paid locality i.e. San Francisco, it goes up to around a 100 thousand.
Most of the federal employees that are officers are expecting pay boosts of up to 1.5 percent by the start of the next year.
This pay rise will be compensated in two parts: 1 percent will be awarded to everyone and the remaining portion of the raise will be distributed amongst the localities after the pay figures are compared and analyzed. This will result in slightly different pay boosts ranging from 1.2 to 1.4 depending on localities.
It’s expected and also proposed by the pay council that more and more localities be added in the coming years in order to ensure that the pay gaps be minimized and certain rudimentary threshold values be met. Positive efforts like these should always be lauded.
New TSP Rules For Special Category Employees
Recently a largely anticipated bill H.R. 2146, which has new TSP rules, was passed by the Congress. This bill is intended to prove beneficial to the federal law enforcement officers and other employees that fall in the special category. As a part of the Bipartisan Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015, this newly approved law will most definitely alter the capability of special category employees accessing their TSP accounts. These alterations to TSP access will be applicable to the following:
- Air Traffic Controllers.
- Customs and Border Patrol Officers.
- Federal Law enforcement officers.
- Federal fighters.
Now this leads us to ask the question that what indeed these changes do. Actually, by the introduction of these amendments, the same benefits that were awarded to local officers will now be given to federal officers as well. So, if you retire after the age of 50, then you will be considered eligible for withdrawing from your TSP account without having to face the 10-15 percent withdrawal penalty. Apart from this, the same regulations will still stay in place.
TSP Rules For Special Category Employees
The reason why we were in desperate need of this change was the fact that most of the law enforcement officers and the firefighters have been able to take money out of their retirement funds if they managed to retire on the year they turned 50 or later. In contrast to this, the federal officers with the same jobs were not given this luxury. The rule that is currently in place dictates that penalty free distributions be only allowed to officers that have retired at the ages of 55 or more. Yes, there is the 72(t) expectancy payment program but because it isn’t flexible enough and because there are many eligible officers that retire before 55, there was an ever-imminent demand of a change. These changes will be put into practice at the beginning of next year and all the withdrawals made after 1st January will not be penalized however any made prior to that date will be applicable to the current prevalent rules.
Here, it’s essential to keep in mind that this law will only alter the TSP access and will in no way alter the benefit fund. Any long term retirement or income plans will still remain the same. Not to mention that if your post-employment income sources were not substantial to let you make both ends meet, then this ease of access won’t make things better. The most obvious advantage is for the officers that are close to the age of 50 and can just stay a few more years before retiring to penalty-free withdrawals for years to come.
All in all, it’s expected that there are going to be many subjective factors that would affect every individual officer’s solution but this change is only going to enhance the options by introducing more flexibility. Having said that, we should laud the congress’ efforts because whenever hard work is done and progress made tangible, admiration and due credit should be given. Here’s hoping that more similar changes get made in the future.
OPM Progresses – Providing Federal Employment For Disabled People
COLA-LifeRingOPM Claims Progress in Providing Federal Employment For People With Disabilities
Back in 2010, President Obama called upon federal agencies and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to provide federal employment for 100,000 people with disabilities.
OPM now says it’s made quite a bit of headway towards this goal. With a whole year of data still to come, the government hired 71,967 full-time permanent federal employees with disabilities in between 2011-2014.
Throw in part-time permanent employees, and the number increases to 80,469. If you factor in temporary employees, the total increases to 115,221.
All told, there were more people with disabilities in federal employment than at any time since the record-keeping began 34 years ago.
In the past year alone, the share of people with disabilities as a percentage of the federal workforce has risen from 12.8 percent to 13.6 percent. Oh, and these aren’t just token jobs. A full 16.4 percent of the new hires among people with disabilities were at the GS 14 and 15 levels.
OPM Director On Federal Employment Opportunities For People With Disabilities
Beth F. Cobert is the Acting Director at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
In a blog post on the OPM.gov website about the federal employment numbers for people with disabilities, Director Corbet said that “This important story is about more than numbers. By demonstrating our commitment to providing equal employment opportunities for Americans with disabilities, we are also tapping into a talent pool that enriches the 2-million strong Federal workforce.”
“We’re holding leaders accountable. We’re working with agencies and affinity groups to build mentoring programs, because we know how important great mentors are to fostering confidence and success. And, we are committed to working with agencies in an effort to provide people with disabilities the reasonable accommodations they need to do their jobs,” added Director Corbet.
Unions Seek to Prevent Fed Employees Health Benefits Premium Hike
A few days ago, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) today announced premiums for the 2016 Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program will rise by an average of 6.4 percent.
OPM is offering a new Self Plus One enrollment type in the FEHB Program that will provide coverage for an enrollee and one designated eligible family member. All FEHB plans will offer a Self Only, Self Plus One, and Self and Family enrollment type beginning in 2016.
On average, enrollees with Self Only coverage will pay $5.50 more each pay period; enrollees with Self and Family coverage will pay $19.61 more per pay period. Those who opt for Self Plus One coverage will pay $8.92 more per pay period than they previously paid for Self and Family coverage. The Government contributes approximately 70 percent of the total cost of a plan’s premium.
“I am pleased that OPM has implemented the new Self Plus One choice for the 2016 plan year. This will give enrollees an opportunity to select coverage just for themselves and their spouse or child,” said OPM Acting Director Beth Cobert.
Federal employee unions including NARFE and NTEU were obviously not as pleased as Director Cobert at the hike in premiums for the health benefits program.
NTEU Seeks Congressional Action to Prevent FEHB Premium Hike
The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) issued a statement noting that this 6.4 percent increase in premiums further underscores the need for Congress to act on cost-saving prescription drug contracting and benefit management reforms for FEHB.
OPM attributed the higher rate of increase in large part to increased prescription drug utilization.
“NTEU views prescription drug reforms as an essential way to better control drug spending in FEHBP, which would reduce costs for federal employees and retirees,” NTEU National President Tony Reardon said. “FEHBP enrollees are paying more than they should.”
Specifically, what the NTEU is asking for is support for Rep. Stephen Lynch’s (D-Mass.) legislation—H.R. 2175. The bill would provide OPM with enhanced oversight and contracting authority to ensure that FEHB participants are receiving the best possible drug prices.
The bill also requires that Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) operate as middlemen to negotiate prescription drug prices with drug companies and pharmacies on behalf of individual FEHB plans, and return any rebates, incentives, and other price discounts obtained from drug manufacturers to FEHB.
Locality Pay Equity Act Corrects Federal Employee Pay Scale
Locality Pay Equity Act Corrects Disparity in Hourly and Salaried Federal Employee Pay Scale
New legislation introduced by Rep. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania seeks to address a longstanding inequality in the federal pay scale when it comes to determining locality pay for blue-collar and white-collar federal employees.
In many locations, hourly and salaried workers who work in the same location are treated as if they work in different locations when it comes to calculating local pay rates.
Currently, General Schedule locality boundaries use Census data on commuting patterns, the proper method for defining a local labor market. Blue-collar locality boundaries are drawn according to the placement of military installations in the 1950s, long before federal white-collar workers were paid local differentials.
The bill (HR 3492 – the Locality Pay Equity Act) addresses this disparity by amending Title 5 to limit the number of local wage areas allowable within a General Schedule pay locality. It will only raise wages of hourly wage employees, and would not affect the general schedule (GS) salaried federal employees in any way.
Locality Pay Equity Act May Pass After Federal Employee Pay Scale Increase
This is not the first time that Rep. Cartwright and other members of the Pennsylvania Congressional delegation have sought to get this bill passed. The same bill was introduced in 2013 as the Locality Pay Equity Act (H.R. 2450). But this time, they may just be able to get it passed, because of the recent federal wage hike.
The Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee (FPRAC) voted back in 2010 to end the practice of treating wage and salary federal employees at the same location differently with regard to the drawing of local labor market boundaries. However, the OPM had been sitting on the policy for years, blaming the federal employee pay freeze as an explanation for the long delay in approval of the regulation.
But now, President Obama’s recently announced federal wage increase of 1.3% includes a 1% across the board hike, plus locality pay calculated to ensure a 1.3% federal wage hike for everyone. This makes it very important that the locality pay doesn’t discriminate against blue-collar federal employees, thus increasing the chances of getting the Locality Pay Equity Act passed.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) supports this legislation. “The Locality Pay Equity Act of 2015 will finally end the practice of treating federal employees in the same work place as if they work in different geographic locations,” said AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. “It’s just common sense.”
