Fed Retirement (Finally) Goes Digital – IOTW Report

Fed Retirement (Finally) Goes Digital

Update on the mine! OPM has successfully executed the first ever fully digital retirement. The process took 2 days and more work is needed, but this is a great improvement from the current paper solution taking multiple months. Great job by the. @USOPM team. – 2/27/25

Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.
– 2/11/25

14 Comments on Fed Retirement (Finally) Goes Digital

  1. Although it’s possible to lose things in a digital storage system, it’s at least reasonably searchable. With paper records, on the other hand, and especially when there are as many as there are in the feddle system, once something’s been misfiled it is most likely gone forever.

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  2. Uncle Al – I remember when Windows Sevin came out (Vista with band-aids) it couldn’t find squat.
    I filed a doc in my file structure, then opened another window to search for the file (using the same name) and it could not find the file – no results. I took a screen shot of it to prove that Windows Sevin was junk. One of the biggest reasons an OS exists is to find things… pathetic!

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  3. @Harry — I almost wept when Windows NT Workstation went away. That was the last decent OS that MSFT published.

    I’ve been retired for over a decade now, but for the last big chunk of career I was quite happy with Unix or Solaris or whatever, or IBM mainframe z/OS or Linux. Much more geek friendly!

  4. Unc – Used NT at the phone company, but in the mid 80s one of the engineers (at another company) wrote our own Linux OS for automated component testing and we put the test routines into modules so if something needed to be changed or de-bugged there was one place to go to. I was conversant in HP Rocky Mountain Basic, but mostly the hardware engineer.

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