The Thrift Savings Plan record-keeping system still has functional problems

When the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board rolled out a new system for managing the TSP back in 2022, it didn’t go well. Account holders encountered a website that barely functioned and long wait times for help. Now, the Government Accountability Office has released findings on what went wrong even though most, but not all,  of the problems are fixed. The director of information technology and cybersecurity at the GAO, Jennifer Franks, joined The Federal Drive with Tom Temin in the studio.

Interview Transcript:

Tom Temin: And let’s begin kind of at the end. Are all of the functions fixed yet, or are there still some things to do on that website?

Jennifer Franks: There are still some things to do. It’s a work in progress, but I will say that the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board has been actively engaged over the last two years of really listening to the customer service complaints and reviewing the customer survey results to really look at what they need to do to really be better stewards of the American taxpayer dollar. They’re actually protecting all of our investments, and they’re really looking at how they can address these concerns rapidly with the contract, as well as the oversight mechanisms to really improve a lot of what went wrong.

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Tom Temin: Yeah, they’re pretty good, I guess, at running investments over the years, and you know, they get congressional oversight and sometimes a little interference in that. But it seems like your report found the fundamental theme is that it’s primarily not a acquisition contracting organization and ran into trouble with oversight of its contractor.

Jennifer Franks: And then that is true and they’re not. So, what happened was they decided, which is totally fine for them, they identified its needs and then assessed alternative solutions for their new TSP record-keeping system. They understood that their legacy system was a bit dated, and it wasn’t rising to the new metrics to meet their constituents’ needs. It wasn’t running efficiently for those of us that like to use smartphones and apps of such to have at our handheld disposals. You were still having to use snail mail to write in for your pass codes and wait for services for day in and day out communications and things were not operating at a 24/7 system operability. So, they wanted to do some updates to that. But to do that, they had to acquire a contract to help them with their hybrid model capabilities. And that’s when Accenture Federal Services came in. They acquired the federal contract and then there were some negotiations with the contract. But where they fell short here is that when you do a contract such as this, there are policies and procedures and there’s guidance that you should have in advance of this contract, that you outline all that you need for your acquisition purposes. And they didn’t do this. It wasn’t until after the contract was established and they started to really roll out what was needed in this new record-keeping system that FRTIB started to really develop some of their policies and procedures a little bit after the life cycle of the project began.

Tom Temin: And were there requirements then up to snuff because that’s where a lot of contracts go off the rails, is because the requirements haven’t been fully and completely understood by the buying agency and then put into the contract deliverables.

Jennifer Franks: Good question. Some of the requirements were and some of them were not. We looked at a number of the milestones that could have been a little bit more fleshed out and aggressively outlined. We looked at their documentation and their system control and testing. Oftentimes, there were constituents even writing to GAO about how they were not able to access even just the security functions. How can I even access and get to my name security, my password information? How can I get my beneficiary information, a significant other, a spouse or an individual passed away, I need to be able to get the monies that this individual left to me. People were writing to TSP for mortgage information or any type of loan disbursements, and they were having all types of different issues, but they were not even able to get their funds. So, with this information, we were seeing all of these different types of issues that were forming and all those types of milestones could have been rectified had these procedures just been highlighted a little bit more clearly in how they set up the procedures.

Tom Temin: Right. The procedures that is for what users and TSP account holders would normally do at this site.

Jennifer Franks: Exactly.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Jennifer Frank. She’s director of information technology and cybersecurity at the Government Accountability Office. And the contract management and planning therefore were deficient on the part of the TSP board. But the contractor is not totally absolved here. Wouldn’t you think that a state of the art website and record system designer and Accenture knows what it’s doing in general might have said, ‘Well, wait a minute, what about finding this information?’ Isn’t every website you have to find security and ID information?

Jennifer Franks: Absolutely. And this is not even just unique to this situation. We do a lot of work across the federal government where we work with agencies and their contract and their oversight. As you know, we’re moving a lot of our systems from on premise into the cloud. But for this and all of the other purposes, we cannot negate how a cloud and a contractor company manages our data. And here in our report, we have three specific recommendations where we highlight how an organization, or this particular organization, needs to look at acquisition for the contract services, but then we look at the oversight. So, you have to be cognizant of how the organization is managing your data so that becomes the organizational perspective. So, you have to have a hand-in-hand approach. And from what we looked at and what we observed with our review, we saw that FRTIB didn’t really have a lot of oversight into what Accenture Federal Services was doing and how they were managing some of the specific performance metrics that they should have been held against in how they were managing the controls for the billions of dollars for the American taxpayer citizens that invested into TSP.

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Tom Temin: Right. There’s the data that is the logical functioning of the website, but then there’s also the data that relates to people’s lifetime savings, if you will.

Jennifer Franks: Yes. Absolutely.

Tom Temin: And we mentioned at the top that some of the functions aren’t there yet, and you were talking in your report about loan repayment, court ordered benefits and accessibility functions. These are highly specific, especially court-ordered benefits and loan repayment. But for the people that need those functions on the TSP, they’re crucial.

Jennifer Franks: They are so the accessibility is a different part of the website for us. So that was looking at more of the Section 508 compliance. So, when you think about accessibility, that gets into that DEIA component. And I know when we think about DEIA, we always go to diversity first. But here, we were really looking at equity and accessibility. So, when you look at the website and how it is designed, and this is for anyone’s website, but specifically this one. Was it user-friendly for all users? And it was not. So, when you think about all generations, from youngest user to maybe your eldest user, somebody who may be incapable of seeing or somebody who may have a difficulty hearing, the website had accessibility limitations. So, this is where that accessibility came in and some limitations there.

Tom Temin: So, it wasn’t even up to the latest standards for 508?

Jennifer Franks: Correct. It was not.

Tom Temin: And on those specific functions for what you do with your money, loan repayment and court-ordered benefits. What’s the story there at this point?

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Jennifer Franks: So, what was happening there and still is happening in some regards. And GAO was getting letters daily. At some point.

Tom Temin: We were getting letters here at Federal News Network.

Jennifer Franks: I’m sure you were. I even had a taxpayer citizen send me an email one time and just say, ‘Would you just do your job?’ You know, I had to laugh and say, ‘Well, I am trying to do my job. I’m trying to get to the bottom of what’s happening and what’s going on, so we can give you the answers.’

Tom Temin: And you are a TSP account holder because you’re also a federal employee.

Jennifer Franks: I am and have been for 18 years since Day One. So, I’m just as invested as they are, but I felt the need and the urgency. I understood people’s lights were getting turned off. People were trying to buy homes and get their accounts validated and people’s spouses were passing away sometimes very unexpectedly, and they needed their funds and they were not even able to get a person on the phone at TSP or they were on the phone for hours and days and getting the runaround. What was happening was we were able to see that FRTIB was making good progress in addressing a lot of the initial concerns. We were able to see them hire and train more thrift line employees and even train them to be able to be better stewards at answering the questions cause what we were seeing happen earlier on was, you know, folks like you and I would call in and we would get through and they wouldn’t even get the answers that they were looking for because the folks on the other line wouldn’t know how to respond. And of course, that was very frustrating for the constituent, right? So, we have seen things come to fruition where some of the account access situations have received solutions where if they were not able to verify the participants’ ID and they were having to send them new pass codes via snail mail and the old pass code had timed out, they’re working through that. Where all the pass codes that they’ve sent you, whether you get the first one or the last one, they’re all going to be valid so that you can access your information. We’re seeing that if you’ve applied for a loan and you’re starting to get repayment inequities and loan repayment alerts and you’re not even having the loan, they’re working with you so you’re not getting penalized or any type of thing, especially when it goes against the IRS and those sorts of things We’re definitely seeing a lot of the beneficiary benefits come to fruition. We’re seeing some of the spousal consent transactions. At one point we were being able to tell that participants reported being able to complete new installment requests, but not having the actual beneficiaries sign over. And this was actually a contradiction to what you should be able to do if I have a significant other, right? I should be able to say who should or should not have access. And people were able to just sign in and out.

Tom Temin: All right. So they got to the really horrible situations pretty quick.

Jennifer Franks: Pretty quick.

Tom Temin: And they’ve been spending the last, say, 18 months or so getting to the more.

Jennifer Franks: Really two years.

Tom Temin: Two years that’s right, getting to those functions that may be fewer and fewer people use, but are nevertheless crucial to those people.

Jennifer Franks: Yeah.

Tom Temin: And let’s review your main recommendations now. I mean, it’s done, the system is there.

Jennifer Franks: It’s there. And to be honest, the main recommendation so we want the FRTIB executive director to really look at establishing and documenting some of these procedures you know, going back and looking at some of your strategic plans and your procedures, to look at how you’re managing your third parties, to really look at your oversight, your continuing negotiations with Accenture Federal Services, and looking at how you’re managing your oversight behavior. We also then want to look at your contractor acquisition process, and we have three recommendations really focused on how the agency itself prepares for the recompetition and recompletion of the record-keeping contract and some of those processes.

Tom Temin: So there is a timeline here? I mean this contract will be the operation of this whole record-keeping system will be recompeted.

Jennifer Franks: Yes, it does have a re compete clause and it is coming up soon. But we do know that they are planning to re compete, of course, and go through some of those areas.

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