As federal employees plan for their eventual retirement from government service, they often consider many financial and lifestyle issues. Agency- provided retirement education is generally the primary source of the information that employees need to plan for these issues before they retire. Retirement benefits represent an important portion of total federal compensation and employees often cite these benefits as a primary reason for staying in government service. Thus, agencies also benefit from sponsoring retirement education programs, which allow them to capitalize on their comparative advantage in competitive labor markets as well as invest in the government's human capital. The Federal Employees’ Retirement System Act of 1986 (FERSA) granted the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and federal agencies broad authority to design and implement retirement education programs for employees covered by the two largest federal civilian retirement programs—the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) and the Federal Employees’ Retirement System (FERS). Specifically, FERSA authorizes agencies to designate retirement counselors who are responsible for providing employees with benefits information, and mandates that OPM establish a training program for these agency retirement counselors.FERSA also created the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board to administer the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). The Thrift Board provides training and information on TSP to agency personnel offices and groups of employees upon agency request; however, it is not responsible for providing retirement education for the federal workforce. CSRS, which was established in 1920, currently includes an annuity and TSP. CSRS’ annuity predates the Social Security system by several years. When the Social Security system was established, Congress decided that employees in CSRS would not be covered by Social Security through their federal employment. Starting in 1987, employees covered by CSRS may also contribute up to 5 percent of their salary to TSP; however, they receive no government contributions. CSRS was closed to new entrants after December 31, 1983, and, according to OPM actuaries, is estimated to end in about 2070, when all covered employees and survivor annuitants are expected to have died. FERS was implemented in 1987 and generally covers those employees who first entered federal service after 1983. The primary impetus for the new program was the Social Security amendments of 1983, which required all federal employees hired after December 1983 to be covered by Social Security. Thus, FERS includes Social Security, an annuity that is smaller than that provided under CSRS, and TSP. The government automatically contributes an amount equal to 1 percent of salary to TSP accounts for all employees covered by FERS, regardless of whether those employees make any voluntary contributions to their accounts. In addition, employees covered by FERS may contribute up to 10 percent of their salaries, up to the current legal maximum of $10,000, and receive government matching contributions on the first 5 percent. At the beginning of fiscal year 1998, CSRS and FERS covered about 2.7 million employees, or 93 percent of the civilian workforce, including U.S. Postal Service employees. As of fiscal year 1995, FERS covered slightly more federal employees than CSRS. In response to the request of Senator Carl Levin, in his former capacity as Ranking Minority Member of the Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services, Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, our objectives in preparing this report were to provide information on what OPM officials and retirement experts view as the recommended content, presentation formats, and timing of retirement education programs and OPM’s and agencies’ retirement education roles, responsibilities, and practices in the context of these recommendations. Because of time and resource constraints, we limited the scope of our review to the education provided to employees covered by CSRS and FERS, who represent the majority of federal civilian employees. To identify OPM’s views on the recommended content, presentation formats, and timing of a retirement education program, we interviewed OPM officials and reviewed OPM’s published guidance on how agencies are to design and implement federal retirement education programs. To identify retirement experts’ views, we interviewed a judgmentally selected group of 15 retirement experts using a structured interview that had been pretested and provided in advance. The experts also responded to a close- ended questionnaire. We used a summary of the experts’ responses as our principal basis for identifying the recommended content, presentation formats, and timing of a retirement education program. In summarizing the experts’ responses to the close-ended questionnaire, we used a super- majority criterion (i.e., agreement on the part of 10 or more experts) to classify a list of 21 potential topics, or content, as (1) essential; (2) recommended, but not essential; or (3) optional. Specifically, we identified a topic as “essential” when 10 or more experts responded that the topic was essential. If the topic did not meet the criterion for being essential, we identified it as “recommended” when 10 or more experts responded that the topic was either essential or recommended. Similarly, if the topic did not meet the criteria for being essential or recommended, we identified it as “optional” when 10 or more experts responded that the topic was essential, recommended, or optional. To identify candidates who had the appropriate background and experience to serve as retirement experts, we solicited and received nominations from the following eight associations and organizations that specialize in retirement and/or financial planning issues: the American Association of Retired Persons, the Employee Benefit Research Institute, the International Association for Financial Planning, the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems, the Pension Research Council, and the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association. For each candidate nominated, we reviewed the biographical information provided by the nominating organization(s). We selected 16 individuals who each had extensive experience with pension or retirement issues and specific expertise on retirement education. The selected experts collectively represented a breadth of professional backgrounds in both the public and private sectors, including academics, unions, financial planning, pension administration, advocacy, financial services, and human resource management consulting. We invited each of the selected candidates to share their views on retirement education, and 15 agreed to do so. Appendix I provides more information on the experts with whom we consulted. To identify OPM’s and agencies’ retirement education roles, responsibilities, and practices in the context of the recommendations on program content, presentation formats, and timing, we interviewed officials representing OPM, the Thrift Board, and 12 randomly selected federal agencies that had 1,000 or more employees and whose headquarters were located within the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. We used a structured interview that had been pretested and provided to the 12 agencies in advance. We also analyzed documents and data provided by the agencies’ officials. We used a summary of the agencies’ practices as the principal basis for comparing the actual practices of the 12 agencies with the recommended content, presentation formats, and timing identified by OPM officials and the experts. We did not independently verify agencies’ responses regarding the specifics of the content, performance formats, and timing of their retirement education programs. Thus, although we used terms such as “provided” and “sponsored” to describe agencies’ practices, we were generally referring to what agencies told us they did. To develop the sample of agencies for our review, we used information from the spring 1997 Central Personnel Data File (CPDF)—an automated information system that contains individual records for most federal civilian employees and is maintained by OPM. The list of agencies used in selecting this sample included 68 organizations that represented a total of 1,682,391 federal employees who were covered by CSRS or FERS. We stratified the 68 organizations according to size (1,000 to 9,999 employees; 10,000 to 99,999 employees; and 100,000 or more employees) and randomly selected 4 agencies from each group. For the Department of Defense (DOD), our list of 68 organizations included only the Departments of the Army, Air Force, and Navy. On this basis, we selected the following 12 agencies for review: the International Trade Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the Department of Commerce; the Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of the Interior; the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), U.S. Customs Service, and U.S. Secret Service of the Department of the Treasury; the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the National Institutes of Health of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); and the Departments of the Navy and Air Force of DOD. The sampled agencies employed about 42 percent of the employees covered by CSRS or FERS from our sampling universe. As agreed, our analysis did not address the effectiveness of OPM's administration of federal retirement education, agencies’ programs, or the retirement education that individual federal employees might receive. Also, we did not attempt to independently validate the information provided to us by OPM and the 12 agencies. Although we audited the reliability of CPDF data for fiscal year 1996 and found it sufficiently reliable for most governmentwide analyses, we did not update that audit.However, we are not aware of changes in the way that agencies submit or OPM processes CPDF data that would materially affect the reliability of the data. We used a random sample to have an objective, unbiased sample. However, as a consequence of our small sample size, the retirement education practices described in this report are not generalizable to all agencies that employ 1,000 or more employees and have headquarters in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. We are reporting solely on the practices of those agencies we surveyed. We did our review in Washington, D.C., from January 1998 to February 1999 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.