I wonder if any other recent retirees out there have experienced this issue this year.
I retired on 12/31/18. Everything went fairly smoothly regarding getting my final paychecks, my lump sum payment for my annual leave was received in January, and my retirement benefit from OPM was finalized with my 4/1 payment, but I experienced two issues…
1. My agency refuses to pay me the retroactive 2019 COLA portion of my annual leave payment. There are numerous references which discuss how retirees receive their annual leave as if they were still working, and therefore any COLA that occurs during that period is applied to a portion of the payment as if you were still working. OPM also specified this year that the late COLA must still be applied retroactively to retirees. Here’s the OPM Fact Sheet that covers how it works:
https://www.opm.gov/poli...yments-for-annual-leave/ In my case the 2019 COLA which was finally authorized and paid out to working Feds in April 2019 should result in an additional payment to me of about $448. I’ve been emailing my HR retirement reps about it since April, and after several months of excuses they finally agreed and forwarded my request to Payroll in late August. Now I’ve bugged them again today for status. It would be nice to get the payment in the same calendar year at least, but it’s looking like I’ll just never get it. The amount is small and won’t break me, it’s more the principle that I’m not getting paid something due to me that’s irritating. The agency I retired from was the NNSA branch of DOE. I asked OPM about this and they were surprised since to their knowledge all agencies were paying this retroactive amount due to retirees.
2. There was one mistake in my retirement benefit. I’m a FERS retiree with a CSRS component. For my sick leave I had 604 hours applicable to my CSRS years in the government (I left that job in 1990 and came back to work in late 1991, 18 months later as CSRS Offset, but then switched to FERS after one pay period. OPM got my total number of sick leave hours correct (over 2200) but the clerk made a data entry error and only gave me credit for 4 hours of sick leave attributable to my CSRS years, instead of 604 hours, and then mistakenly applied that other 600 hours to my FERS time. The end result is that my annuity came out $19/month lower than it should be. I called OPM about this right away, then per their instruction emailed them two documents proving I had 604 hours of sick leave with I left my CSRS job in 1990 and a description of the error. They assured me a Specialist would be assigned to fix it and it would get fixed. Two months later, in June, I called and was told that my request was dropped by the Specialist, for no reason other than they just didn’t want to do it. The OPM phone rep actually said that. What?!! I was then told I’d need to submit my request again, by formal letter this time, and then wait a "very very long time" for it to get fixed. I did that in July, and am now waiting. I called last month to make sure that they did get my letter and they said yes, and it was assigned to a Specialist in late August (it took them a full month just to do that), and was told again that it will take an "very long time" to get to it. Sheez. This error could be fixed in 2 minutes. As with issue #1 above, it’s not a lot of money (though with future COLA’s and hopefully decades of annuities to come it will add up to a significant sum), but it’s more the principle of OPM not caring that’s irritating.
Anyone else have similar issues this year?