Two-plus years in, TSP website is almost there

As someone who will be retiring in around seven months — semi-retire, anyhow — I sympathize with readers’ frustrations with the Thrift Savings Plan website. After relaunching two years ago, the TSP board has been steadily improving the site.

Initially, it was sort of a disaster, as we reported at the time. Like other federal website disasters — the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board has plenty of company — it does more than just annoy users. It causes them to question the motivation and competence of site purveyors. The FRTIB isn’t some ill-intentioned, evil bunch. Quite the opposite, but it’s still digging out of the reputational ditch website issues seem to push organizations into.

People at first couldn’t access their accounts, and telephone wait times grew out of control. People could not set minimum required withdrawals and faced tax penalties as a result. False notices of successful transfers issued out of the system. It prompted a quick Government Accountability Office review in 2023. Earlier this month, GAO came out with a more detailed look at the website project, and concluded, “The agency and contractor have improved the system, but there’s more to do.”

For instance, court-ordered benefits payments “were wrong and didn’t meet federal standards.” And, the GAO noted, contractor Accenture “doesn’t have to share data on certain transactions — so the agency can’t oversee them.” That does sound like work to do.

To its credit, the TSP board focused on the issues early on, beefed up its call center and employee training, and prodded Accenture to fix the most glaring shortcoming early on.

Among the general lessons learned — and no surprises here — the FRTIB was a bit of a babe-in-the-woods on the procurement front. As many an agency has learned, the original sin of important IT acquisitions often consists of  several elements, such as: off-the-mark requirements development; setting, documenting, and holding contractors accountable for milestones; taking care of basics such as system testing requirements and compliance with federal standards.

GAO’s director on the case, Jennifer Franks, said, “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.”

Her report essentially isn’t merely about the website itself so much as it is about the acquisition shortcomings that led to the site’s problems. You learn that right from the title: “Investment Board Needs to Greatly Improve Acquisition Management and Contractor Oversight.”

Franks said some frustrated feds were writing to GAO itself with complaints about the site.

Complaints continue. One reader said the monthly rates of return data don’t get published soon enough after the month, stating that July wasn’t available as of earlier this week.

Still, as related by Federal Drive guest Abe Grungold, things have improved markedly. Abe found pluses and still a few negatives. Indeed, he noted the difficulty in look-back for previous balances over weeks, months or years. The board has said people access that information so rarely that it didn’t seem efficient to keep it online.

One reader called me a “brave soul” for airing the interview. She expressed “extreme anger” at the removal of that look-back function. I had joked in the interview, just write down your weekly balances in a spreadsheet. This reader called that “less than comical.” This shows me that the TSP website matters deeply to feds. I’m pretty sure the FRTIB understands that.

On the positive side: You can adjust your withdrawals without a lot of fuss, right on the website. No phone calls needed.

“I made a change to my TSP withdrawal without calling anyone,” Grungold, a retired fed, told me. “I was on the website. I canceled my withdrawal, and within minutes, I created a new one and I got it approved within two days.”

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