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Modernizing a system that helps calculate benefits for retirees

Overview

The federal government employs more retirees than any other employer in the United States, with approximately 100,000 people retiring from federal positions annually [OPM]. Specialists in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) distribute billions of dollars in retirement annuities to retirees and their survivors each year and each individual needs to receive exactly what they are owed. We helped modernize the legacy system by building responsive interfaces and secure backend infrastructure for the new retirement benefits calculation platform.

The challenge

OPM specialists rely on the Federal Annuity Claims Expert System (FACES) to calculate retirement benefits. FACES adjudicates thousands of retirement benefits actions daily using more than a thousand business rules. However, this system was first built in the 1990s and now has components that are no longer supported by the manufacturer. The business rules are hard-coded formulas with limited documentation, making it expensive and time-consuming to fix bugs, update calculations, or add new features. OPM needed to replace this antiquated system with a modern, performant service that would be easy to use and maintain.

Our contribution

As part of a larger team led by Coforma, Blue Tiger provided senior-level software engineering support to this effort.

We joined an established team and quickly integrated into their workflow, contributing to code development, reviews, and overall code quality improvements. More specifically, we:

  • Implemented user interfaces that allow specialists to evaluate multiple financial scenarios rather than just single scenarios, using the United States Web Design System (USWDS) to ensure the interfaces are responsive, accessible, and easy to use.
  • Made significant contributions to the backend and infrastructure, including security enhancements critical for handling Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and sensitive financial data.
  • Created a comprehensive battery of automated unit tests to ensure the code’s extensibility and maintainability for future development teams.

The results

As a result of this effort, we:

  • Delivered responsive, accessible, secure, and performant code that modernizes how OPM specialists calculate federal retirement benefits.
  • Implemented a testing framework to ensure the system remains maintainable and extensible as requirements evolve, supporting accurate benefit calculations for thousands of federal retirees.

Team members

  • Raphael Krut-Landau
  • Jesse Skeets

Practices used

  • Responsive design
  • Accessible design
  • Agile development
  • API-first development
  • RESTful API architecture
  • DevSecOps
  • Cloud hosting