Modernizing a system that helps calculate benefits for retirees

The federal government has more retired employees than any other employer in the United States. Every year, approximately 100,000 people retire from federal positions [OPM]. Specialists in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) distribute billions of dollars annually in retirement annuities to retirees and their survivors. Each retiree must receive exactly what they are owed, an amount determined by federal law – not a penny less or more.

The challenge

To get these calculations exactly right, specialists at OPM currently rely on a piece of software called the Federal Annuity Claims Expert System (FACES). FACES adjudicates thousands of retirement benefits actions each day. It has more than a thousand business rules. First built in the 1990s, this software has components that are no longer supported by the manufacturer. The business rules are hard-coded formulas with limited documentation. Fixing bugs, updating the calculations, and adding new features is expensive and time-consuming. OPM’s goal is to replace this antiquated system with a modern, performant service that is easy to use and maintain.

Our contribution

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

Blue Tiger engineers joined a team that had worked together on a previous phase of the project. We were able to onboard quickly and start working as part of the team almost immediately. We played indispensable roles on the team – writing new code, participating in code reviews, and contributing to improving the quality of the code base. More specifically:

• We implemented interfaces that allow specialists to evaluate not just a single financial scenario, but multiple scenarios. We built the interfaces using the United States Web Design System (USWDS), ensuring the interfaces are responsive, accessible, and easy to use

• We made many contributions to the backend and infrastructure. This included helping secure the application – important since it handles so much Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

The results

We wrote responsive, accessible, secure, and performant code. We created a battery of automated unit tests to ensure the code's extensibility and maintainability in the future.

Team members

• Raphael Krut-Landau

• Jesse Skeets

Practices used

• Responsive design

• Accessible design

• Agile development

• API-first development

• RESTful API architecture

• DevSecOps

• Cloud hosting