Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., called the government's outdated retirement systems "scandalously wasteful" and "unacceptable." She told the Office of Personnel Management to make modernizing them a top priority this year.

"This cannot be a casual endeavor for your office," Mikulski said Feb. 2 in a letter sent to OPM Director John Berry. "Promises made must be promises kept."

Mikulski said the roughly quarter-million federal employees and retirees she represents in Maryland are increasingly complaining about the time OPM takes to calculate retirement benefits and about OPM's derailed plans to fix the flawed system. She said retirees often receive smaller pensions than they are entitled to for several months while OPM calculates the correct benefit.

Mikulski also said some retirees have been overpaid and forced to repay the government, with interest.

"This is an equally unacceptable practice," Mikulski wrote Berry. "I know the problems with this system started long before you became director and what you inherited is scandalously wasteful and ineffective. But during this terrible recession, it is unacceptable that federal employees cannot get the information they need to plan for retirement."

OPM canceled its troubled retirement systems modernization contract with Hewitt Associates last year after its system failed numerous tests. Berry said in May that OPM would scale back its original plans, which included an online annuity calculator, and instead focus solely on modernizing the government's legacy paper-based system.

OPM in January set up a new division to oversee retiree benefit issues, which Berry said would be charged with setting up a new strategy for modernizing retirement systems.