Every year, thousands of employees file for federal retirement and begin the process of converting decades of service into lifetime benefits. Behind the scenes, that transition is managed by the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Retirement Operations Center (ROC) in Boyers, Pennsylvania, a facility located 230 feet underground in a former limestone mine excavated in 1902. There, about 600 employees handle roughly 8,000 retirement applications per month, most of them still processed largely by hand.
The scale of the operation is immense. OPM Director Scott Kupor described it as, “practically like its own fully contained city, with golf carts as the preferred mode of transportation.” The Boyers site houses 26,000 file cabinets containing more than 400 million pieces of paper, representing the service histories and benefit records of millions of current and former federal workers. Each retirement package must be assembled from documents held by multiple agency HR and payroll offices, verified, and then manually reviewed to determine eligibility and calculate the final annuity.
This paper-heavy process has been the norm for decades and, while effective, can lead to delays. Even though most retirees begin receiving their full benefits within 60 to 90 days, incomplete records or slow interagency coordination can extend that timeline. One of the biggest challenges is the fragmented federal HR system; more than 115 separate HR and payroll platforms feed into OPM, many of which are not fully compatible.
Previous attempts to modernize the retirement process, spanning the 1980s through the 2000s, cost more than $130 million but largely failed because they focused on digitizing paper without improving the underlying workflow. To address these challenges, OPM has launched a multi-phase effort to modernize federal retirement processing. As previously reported, the new Online Retirement Application (ORA) allows employees to submit and track their retirement paperwork electronically. The ORA connects to a digital file system (DFS) and a new annuity calculator known as JANUS, creating a more seamless, paperless workflow.
In addition, OPM is expanding its Interim Pay program to reduce financial uncertainty for new retirees. Under the updated system, employees will receive at least 80% of their estimated annuity within 30 days of OPM receiving their application, with final adjustments made once the full review is complete. The agency is also hiring additional staff, improving customer service tools, and strengthening coordination with agency HR offices to reduce errors and speed processing times.
Together, these steps represent OPM’s most comprehensive modernization effort in decades. The current effort aims to do more than move forms online: it seeks to replace a system built around paper files and manual calculations with a faster, more accurate, and more reliable process, ultimately improving federal retirement processing for the workforce.
