OPM Ends Paper Retirement System, Digitizing 400 Million Records After 1980s-Era Process
Updated
Updated · Fox News · Jul 1
OPM Ends Paper Retirement System, Digitizing 400 Million Records After 1980s-Era Process
1 articles · Updated · Fox News · Jul 1
Summary
OPM marked its “Last Day of Paper” at the Boyers, Pennsylvania retirement center, ending a paper workflow that had federal agencies mailing retirement files into an underground mine.
About 400 million paper records had been stored there while staff manually processed roughly 10,000 retirements a month; OPM said the files are now digitized and the paper documents will be shredded.
Scott Kupor said earlier modernization efforts under prior administrations never gained traction, and that the Trump administration accelerated OPM’s online retirement application after Elon Musk publicly mocked the mine-based system.
Musk said the change should let federal workers retire without waiting up to six months, while OPM cast the overhaul as a broader push to cut bureaucracy and taxpayer costs through government modernization.