After the retirement surge in January 2020, employees at the Office of Personnel Management were secretly hoping that the same thing wouldn’t happen for a while. Then, the world welcomed 2021 with hopes that the pandemic would end and a better year would come. However, the wishes of the OPM didn’t come true as nearly 14,000 workers retired and added to the backlog—currently, it sits at nearly 27,000. To find another backlog this long, you would have to go back to April 2013.
In total, the retirement wave this year was smaller by around 3,300. However, the OPM fell behind in the second half of 2020 with long processing times and other issues. As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc, processing times are high, and this doesn’t look to be changing any time soon.
To put the lull into perspective, it managed to process over 10,000 retirements in January 2020. At the end of the same year, this monthly total was down to just 5,600. In January 2021, the OPM processed just under 6,600 retirees, and this is only two-thirds of the year before. With retirement spikes at the beginning of the year, this is always the busiest time for the OPM, and the backlog ensures that it will be busy for many months to come.
In terms of processing times, it’s now around 85 days, an increase from 74 days in December. If we consider the last twelve months, the average retiree had to wait 78 days to process their retirement.
When releasing the latest statistics, the OPM wanted to make clear the difference between cases produced in under and over 60 days; for cases produced in 60 days or more, completion took 104 days compared to just 51 for cases produced in under 60 days.
Another retirement surge has caused a backlog of cases in 2021, and the OPM has some work to do to clear it.
