The story last week about the Office of Personnel Management bringing in a 25-year IT veteran, David Bohen, to serve as its new chief technology officer to concentrate on the agency’s outdated retirement system reminded me of my own recent experience with the federal retirement system.

I left federal government service over a year ago after 30+ years, but decided to delay my formal retirement because I was too busy and had heard about the long delays in processing retirement applications.

In fact, I remember well listening to OPM Director John Berry’s keynote at the FOSE Institute Knowledge Management Conference last May and about the improvements in processing time that had, and would, be made under his leadership. That gave me hope that if I waited a little longer my experience would be better and it was.

I was especially interested in the part of the story that said: “OPM also created a proof of concept of an online retirement application to demonstrate how an electronic, web-based application could be used to collect data from an applicant and his or her agency human resource office that is required when an employee retires. This information could be used to reduce dependence on the current paper process.”

The paper (online PDF) application was the only thing that really bothered me because I thought in this day and age it would be electronic.

So here are the things I learned and the timeline I experienced:

The online PDF form Application for Immediate Retirement (CSRS) and is 20 pages long. (Less than my OMB online security clearance which was over 50 pages long!)

You do not need to complete the Certified Summary of Federal Service part of the form

(SF2801 pages 17-20) because your agency should forward that to OPM soon after you leave your agency. The story mentioned “on average, it takes 133 days to process requests for employee salary records from various agency in order to calculate retirement payouts. I really like that OPM starts giving you a interim payment that is usually less than the final calculated amount.

I sent my paperwork on November 22nd. Note: The paperwork should be sent to: US Office of Personnel Management, P.O. Box 440, Boyers, PA 16017-0440, unless you are in a hurry like I was, and then it should be overnighted to: 1137 Branchton Road, Boyers, PA 16017-0440. It cannot be hand-delivered to OPM in Washington, DC.

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