Questions and criticisms are being directed at the $739.9 billion Thrift Savings Plan, Washington, over the rollout of recent website updates under a new record keeper.
The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, Washington, which oversees the TSP for 6.6 million federal employees and members of the uniformed services, in November 2020 selected Accenture Federal Services as record keeper. Accenture's contract began June 1.
New plan features include an updated participant log-in interface; a TSP mobile app and virtual assistant; the ability to electronically sign documents and complete transactions online; and the opening of a mutual fund window, which gives eligible TSP participants access to more than 5,000 mutual funds.
Since the transition to Accenture, though, some participants have expressed issues with logging into their accounts, long customer service wait times and transaction difficulties.
"This is insanely frustrating," said Barbara Volpe, a Securities and Exchange Commission employee in Washington, in an email. "The old website provided quick access to views of current holding in both columnar and pie chart format. It was easy to move from holdings to contributions. The new site is opaque. It takes several clicks to find holdings detail the old site showed everything with one click."
On social media, other users have said they have been locked out of their accounts and unable to transfer funds.
TSP has acknowledged issues with the updates in a response to a June 10 letter from Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-Washington. "We anticipated that the transition, as most are, would be bumpy. ... However, some of our participants are facing more difficulties than we expected."
The TSP website now includes a "current known issues" portion to address frequently reported problems.
While the contractor has added more call center employees to deal with the record-breaking number of calls, according to its response to Del. Norton, TSP's website still features a banner warning of longer than normal wait times.
Ms. Norton said TSP's response "fails to provide information on what the FRTIB plans to do to correct the problems. I will continue to seek answers, fixes, and accountability," in a June 21 news release. "There were no questions to the questions I posed," she said in a telephone interview Monday, adding that she is considering a requesting a hearing on the issue.
Accenture could not be reached for comment. A spokewoman for the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board said that members would discuss the issues Tuesday at their regular monthy meeting. She added that the top priority is ensuring the call centers are adequately staffed
