The Office of Personnel Management saw a hiccup in its pension processing efforts in April, when the number of claims processed dropped to 8,028. That was slightly below the 8,300 claims it expected to process that month, and noticeably below the 12,386 claims it processed in March.
But May brought slightly better news for OPM. According to monthly stats released today, the number of claims processed in May jumped back up to 9,066 — about 500 more than OPM anticipated it would process last month. This helped bring the size of the backlog down to 49,473 — about 5,100 fewer cases than it expected to have by the end of May.
And for the second month in a row, the number of retirement claims actually received by OPM was lower than anticipated. OPM expected 8,000 feds to retire last month, but only got 7,523 retirement applications.
Federal Times also reported earlier today that 18 percent of retirement applications last year had errors that then had to be fixed by OPM.
