U.S. Office of Personnel Management www.opm.gov - Recruiting, Retaining and Honoring a World-Class Workforce to Serve the American People

FY 2001 Performance and Accountability Report Homepage A Message from the Director A Message from the Chief Financial Officer OPM at a Glance Highlights and Management Accomplishments

OPM AT A GLANCE

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) provides human resource management leadership and compensation expertise to the President, Federal agencies, and their employees. It oversees the civil service merit systems, covering nearly 1.8 million employees, and provides fast, friendly, accurate, and cost-effective retirement, health benefit, and other insurance services to Federal employees, annuitants, beneficiaries, and agencies.

Founding Legislation
The Pendleton Act of 1883 established the merit system and set up OPM's predecessor organization, the United States Civil Service Commission. The purpose of the Pendleton Act was to end the practice of giving Federal jobs as rewards for political support. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 transformed the Commission into the Office of Personnel Management, entrusting the agency with governmentwide human resources management responsibilities and making it more directly accountable to the President.

Current Role
OPM is leading agencies in implementing the President's human capital management initiative, one of five initiatives designed to make government more citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-based. The human capital initiative recognizes that the government delivers products and services to the American taxpayer through the people who make up the Federal workforce. OPM sets policies and provides assistance to all the agencies that make up the government—from Agriculture to NASA to the Social Security Administration, and all the agencies in between—to enable them to manage their workforce to attain goals important to the nation. OPM does this by working closely with agencies to ensure that they are strategically aligning their workforce to achieve their missions and by providing a broad range of human resources management tools to recruit, retain, and manage a high-performing workforce.

Budgetary Resources
OPM's total discretionary funding of $206.7 million in FY 2001 was almost evenly divided between its two major missions: 1) managing and overseeing the government's human resources and 2) administering the employee benefit trust funds (retirement, health benefits, and life insurance) It also includes significant resources for information technology projects aimed at increasing efficiency to save taxpayer dollars and maximizing citizen service—for example, by simplifying the job application process.

In addition to the discretionary funding, in FY 2001 OPM paid out: $47 billion in annuities to more than 2.4 million retired employees, their survivors, and other beneficiaries; almost $21 billion in health insurance premiums for nine million enrollees and dependents; and almost $2 billion in life insurance claims. In FY 2001, OPM began work on a new program to offer group long-term care insurance products to approximately 20 million members of the Federal civilian and uniformed services, their families, and retirees; this benefit will be available in FY 2003. OPM also provides a variety of direct services that are financed by payments from other agencies through the Revolving Fund. In FY 2001, payments to OPM's Revolving Fund totaled $332 million.

Location
OPM is headquartered at 1900 E Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20415 where many of its approximately 3,000 employees work. OPM also has a field presence in 16 major cities across the country, and operating centers, in Macon, Georgia, and Pittsburgh and Boyers, Pennsylvania. Our website can be found at www.opm.gov.

Organizational Structure
During fiscal year 2001, OPM was organized into eight core functional units, each providing governmentwide policy and services in a specific area of human resources management: the Employment Service (ES); the Investigations Service (IS); the Retirement and Insurance Service (RIS); the Workforce Compensation and Performance Service (WCPS); the Office of Merit Systems Oversight and Effectiveness (OMSOE); the Office of Workforce Relations (OWR); the Office of Executive Resources Management (OERM); and the Office of Executive Management Development (OEMD). [See organization chart below]. We also had four "corporate management" offices-such as our Offices of the Chief Financial and Information Technology Officers—and several staff offices.

OPM embarked on a significant restructuring effort within the agency in 2001. This restructuring will improve OPM's focus on its primary customers, the agencies that deliver products and services to the American people.

U.S. Office of Personnel Management flowchart data

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