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Washington, D.C. –The head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today expressed hope that the plan recently unveiled by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to address delays in the processing of federal retiree pension claims will generate the meaningful improvements that are needed.

“The attention that OPM is paying to the very serious problem of delays in processing retirement claims is real progress on an issue that NTEU has been concerned with for many years,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley.

She added: “The question is whether OPM’s plan can be quickly implemented, and also whether it is enough to end the unacceptable delays.” OPM has made improving the current system a priority goal, and noted that at present the average time to process a new retirement claim is 156 days, with a pending backlog numbers of 48,378 cases.

President Kelley, who has previously told congressional committees of the serious hardships resulting from delayed full annuity payments, offered her views in testimony submitted to a Senate subcommittee. She said an additional positive step would be to strongly encourage individual federal agencies to improve their retiree pension submissions.

“If some agencies are consistently providing incomplete information, something more serious than a possible additional audit needs to happen,” President Kelley said in testimony submitted to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on the Oversight of Government Management and the Federal Workforce.

“At a minimum,” the NTEU leader said, “the monthly reports OPM intends to initiate should include information on the speed, accuracy and completeness of agency case submissions, and the (chief human capital officers) of agencies that consistently have problems must be charged with taking immediate action to improve those submissions.”

President Kelley blamed the problem, in part, on efforts by the previous administration to automate the claims process in one fell swoop, a failed effort that cost of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it.

Moreover, she said, budget and staffing issues have played a key role. In anticipation of moving to a computerized system, she said, OPM reduced claims processing staff between 2005 and 2009; more recently, its 2011 budget was cut by some $6 million. Even with an increase of $3.8 million for this year, the division handling these claims is still $2 million below 2010 funding levels.

Kelley said NTEU supports immediate action to “maximize the use of detailees from other agencies” with legal administrative specialist experience, while planned new hires in that specialty receive the training they would need.

NTEU is the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.