The Office of Personnel Management is vowing to tackle its backlog of retirement applications. OPM received more the 15,000 new retirement applications this month, which is more than double the normal load. All told, there's a backlog of about 50,000 cases.

"What I advise retiring employees to make sure of is at least four to six months before they retire, they check their personnel files to make sure that everything in that file is complete, so that once it gets to OPM's retirement office for processing, it'll take OPM less time to get it processed," said Ed Zurdorfer, registered employee benefit consultant. "If something's missing, OPM's going to have to do what's called adjudication to get things worked out."

Zurndorfer spoke with The Federal Drive with Tom Temin Friday morning about what other things they can do to help smooth the retirement process.