The overwhelmed retirement claims backlog at the Office of Personnel Management is only partly a technology problem.

At a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight, OPM Director John Berry said the agency is hiring new customer-service representatives to break the backlog.

“We’ve got to be smarter in how we do IT,” Berry acknowledged. “But for the foreseeable future, we’re dealing with a paper and pencil process and that’s why I’m hiring more people and doing it within a frozen budget.”

John Salamone, a managing consultant at FMP Consulting and the former executive director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, joined In Depth with Francis Rose to discuss the potential complications for OPM ahead.

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