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Washington, D.C.—The nation’s largest independent union of federal workers today offered its support of a government initiative to convert federal employee Official Personnel Files (OPFs) from paper copies to an electronic format, but asked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for a briefing and demonstration of the planned system.

The briefing and demonstration, said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), would help the union “fully prepare to address employee concerns and engage in productive impact and implementation bargaining as individual agencies convert to the new system.”

The NTEU leader said the union sees the effort to computerize OFPs as having “the potential of providing federal employees with significant benefits, starting with the opportunity it creates for individuals to monitor the content of their respective personnel files in order to verify their accuracy.”

At the same time, however, President Kelley noted the likelihood that “many employees will be greatly concerned about such a major change, particularly given the security issues raised whenever information is made available over the Internet.”

In a letter to OPM, the NTEU leader raised a number of “areas of concern” about the initiative, focusing mainly on the nature and extent of security measures in place to safeguard employee privacy.

At the same time, she said, NTEU wants to know how employees can flag an error in the electronic record and how an agency will investigate that issue; what will happen to the printed records once the electronic conversion is complete; whether employees can trust that the OPF will be the only personnel file retained throughout government; what will happen to such files upon an employee’s retirement; how a survivor would obtain access to the records if, for example, a court authorized its release; when and how the records would be ultimately destroyed; the extent of training and support that will be available to employees and their survivors; and similar issues.

“By learning the answers to these types of issues as early as possible,” Kelley said, “NTEU will be able to help educate employees about the advantages of the new system, assuage employee concerns and generally ease the transition” to the e-OPF program.

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.