Retirement Processing Efforts Doubled Before Surge in January

The Office of Personal Management was very busy last month, especially compared to November. The agency was preparing for an annual rush of new requests for retirement claims. In December, OPM processed more than twice the number of claims they processed in November.

In the past few months, fewer retirement claims were being processed for two reasons. First, staff members were prepping for the rush of claims that comes each January. Also, the OPM did not have adequate funding to pay for the overtime that would have been necessary to process more claims.

However, in December, the agency drastically increased its efforts in processing claims. In that November, they processed 5,138 claims. In December, they more than doubled this number to 10,347. This is the highest number of claims they have processed in a single month since March 2017.

This crackdown on processing retirement claims, as well as a fairly low number of claims received in December, led to a large dent in the retirement backlog. That number is now at only 14,515. OPM’s target backlog number is 13,000.

OPM’s monthly report also stated that the agency is changing how it measures the success of its processing efforts. The agency has always provided information on the percentage of claims processed within 60 days and the average time it takes to process a case both within and beyond 60 days. Starting in April, OPM will provide the raw numbers as well as the average processing time on both a monthly and fiscal-year-to-date basis.

With this new reporting system, the average processing time on a monthly basis decreased from 68 days in November to just 60 days last month. Fiscal 2018 began on October 1. So far in this fiscal year, the average processing time for a claim was 63 days. This is down 3 days from what was reported in November.

January is usually a very busy time for OPM in regards to retirement claims. The agency often receives over 15,000 claims each January.