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If you are planning your retirement for Dec. 31, first of all, congratulations! Second, be aware that it's only 128 days away. Now is the time to complete your applications and turn them in to your human resources office. If you're in a large organization, it's not too early. Although the application won't be sent to the Office of Personnel Management until after you've retired, it is a good idea to allow plenty of time for your agency to complete their part of the processing of your transition from employee to annuitant.
Remember that the high-three average salary that is used to compute your annuity will be the average of your basic pay adjusted for locality from Jan. 1, 2020 through Dec. 31, 2022. Unless, of course, your salary over three consecutive years was higher at an earlier time in your career.
Also, keep in mind you won't receive any of the 2022 cost of living adjustment that is due to current retirees on Jan. 1, 2023. In fact, those under the Federal Employees Retirement System who are retiring under age 62 will not see a COLA until the year they turn 62 before Dec. 1. The exception is special groups, such as law enforcement officers, who are subject to mandatory retirement before they turn 62.
So where do you begin with the process of retiring at the end of this year? It starts with gathering the right forms and publications:
If all of this seems a bit daunting to you, here are some other resources that provide important information about the retirement process:
Next week, we'll look at a specific checklist of to-do items before and after your retirement date.
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Officials with the federal contractor responsible for the Thrift Savings Plan's headache-inducing transition to a new recordkeeping service apologized Wednesday for the many difficulties participants experienced over the past few months and vowed to continue to improve the new system.
At the monthly meeting of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which administers the federal government's 401(k)-style retirement savings program, representatives with Accenture Federal Services acknowledged a number of mistakes in how the public-facing portion of the June transition to a new recordkeeping system worked.
"We want to start with an apology: In the early days of the program's go-live, the call center experience was not up to the standards of the FRTIB, it wasn't up to our standards, and it certainly wasn't the experience that the participants and beneficiaries of the Thrift Savings Plan deserved," said Elaine Beeman, the company's civilian portfolio lead. "We've been working night and day to fix it, and we've got very good news in terms of metrics . . . We're very close to meeting all of our targets, and we're very pleased about that, and we were able to take the 'high call volume' message off of the website last week, and we hope now we are in a position to offer the world-class experience participants and beneficiaries deserve."
Since the TSP moved to Accenture's recordkeeping system on June 1, participants have bemoaned a variety of issues with the new service. In the early days, many struggled to set up new login credentials to access their accounts online and update beneficiary designations. Participants also faced hours-long wait times for service via the ThriftLine call center. But as those problems began to subside over the last month, Government Executive has received complaints of more individualized problems accessing loans, making transactions and the new process for requesting historical documents that once were readily available on the TSP's website.
Owen Davies, Accenture's client account lead, acknowledged Wednesday that the company severely underestimated call center demand and made setting up TSP.gov accounts too difficult.
"When we went live, all of our work was planning for a certain amount of call volume, and we took the TSP's largest single volume day in the past, and doubled it, figuring that was a reasonable expectation," he said. "But instead of two times, we got six times the call volume, and we weren't prepared for that or staffed for that, which led to a really horrible experience for participants. The second thing we did exacerbated that: with a mind towards fraud protection, we required everyone to set up new online credentials . . . We made that process really cumbersome, and it was really hard for a vast number of users, and that in combination created a really bad situation. Everyone felt it and you felt it and your brand felt it."
Davies touted recent data indicating that those two issues have largely subsided thanks to the contractor easing account setup rules and increased staffing and training of call center employees. "Reskilling" ThriftLine representatives should make the process of getting help for those struggling with issues like loans and withdrawals easier, he said.
"So far, around 2 and a quarter million participants have claimed their account and set it up successfully, and our call volume is dropping," he said. "We're at around 21,000 per day, which is still higher than the historical average, but we expect we'll see that trend continue downward. Another thing we're working on is we're trying to get to an outcome within the first call."
Moving forward, Davies said Accenture plans to keep making improvements to the new website to make it easier for participants to use and make changes.
"Here's what we're focused on now: the online experience for installment payments, withdrawals and loans," he said. "Some of those things have been implemented, and some are still coming. We're also looking at increasing access to historical documents, trying to figure out if there's a way to make some of that more available to participants if needed."
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The Federal Salary Council last week issued a series of recommendations that would improve the locality pay of nearly 30,000 federal employees, if implemented.
The council, an advisory body made up of presidential appointees and representatives from federal employee unions, agreed on their annual list of new locality pay areas, which this year include Fresno, Calif., and Spokane, Wash., in addition to a series of locations they recommended be added to existing locality pay areas: Emporia, Va., and Greensville County, Va., would belong to Richmond; Dukes and Nantucket counties, Mass., would be part of Boston, Huron County, Mich., would join the Detroit locality pay area, and Pacific and San Juan counties, Wash., would be included in the Seattle region.
All of the council's recommendations must be finalized by the President's Pay Agent, after which they would go to the Office of Personnel Management, which must issue regulations to implement the proposals.
The council also recommended long-discussed changes to the criteria by which the government decides when to create a locality pay area, as well as when to add locations to an existing locality pay area. For years, federal officials have requested exemptions from the current criteria because of difficulties attracting or retaining federal workers. The new criteria would tweak the commuting rate that locations must have with neighboring jurisdictions, and more importantly, they remove the requirement that a region have at least 2,500 General Schedule employees.
Updating the locality pay area criteria alone would increase the pay of around 15,400 federal workers who are currently part of the Rest of U.S. locality pay area. According to documents prepared for last week's council meeting, 24 multi-county areas would become eligible for inclusion in existing locality pay areas.
Included in the list are: Columbus-Auburn-Opelika, Ga. And Ala., which would join the Atlanta locality pay area; Tuscaloosa, Ala., would join Birmingham, Ala.; the Lebanon, N.H.-Vt., metropolitan area would join Boston; Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, N.C., would join Charlotte, N.C.; Rockford-Freeport-Rochelle, Ill., would join Chicago; Mansfield-Ashland-Bucyrus, Ohio, and Youngstown-Warren, Ohio and Penn., would join Cleveland; Ardmore, Okla., would join Dallas; Dixon-Sterling, Ill., would join Davenport, Iowa; Lansing-East Lansing, Mich., would join Detroit; Florence-Muscle Shoals, Ala., would join Huntsville, Ala.; and Bloomington-Bedford, Lafayette-West Lafayette-Frankfort, and Richmond-Connersville would all join Indianapolis' locality pay area.
Additionally, Mankato-New Ulm, and Rochester-Austin, Minn., would join Minneapolis' locality pay area; Salisbury-Cambridge, Md. And Del., would join Philadelphia, except for portions of the region already a part of the Washington-Baltimore locality pay area; Johnstown-Somerset, Penn., and Wheeling, W.V.-Ohio would join Pittsburgh; Fayetteville, N.C.—with the exception of Moore County—and Rocky Mount-Wilson-Roanoke Rapids, N.C., would join Raleigh, N.C.; Kerrville-Fredericksburg, Texas would join San Antonio; and Cumberland, Md.-W.V., would join the Washington, D.C., locality pay area.
A full list of additions to locality pay areas based on the proposed criteria changes can be found here.
The President's Pay Agent is expected to issue its own report before the end of the year, rendering a final decision on the council's recommendations. Simpler recommendations, like new locality pay areas and specifically recommended new areas of application for existing locality pay areas, would be implemented by OPM in time for the 2024 pay raise.
But the change in criteria may not see fruit until 2025. If OPM can issue regulations to change the criteria before the salary council meets next year, the salary council would then make recommendations to add the aforementioned regions to the locality pay area map, after which point the pay agent would have to act to implement them.
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 | |
| Introduced | 16 September 1997 |
|---|---|
| TLD type | Country code top-level domain |
| Status | Active |
| Registry | Afilias |
| Intended use | Entities connected with  British Indian Ocean Territory |
| Actual use | Popular with startup companies, browser games |
| Registration restrictions | None for 2nd level registrations; 3rd level registrant must be resident of British Indian Ocean Territory |
| Structure | Registrations are taken directly at the second level or at third level beneath various 2nd-level labels |
| Documents | Terms & Conditions; Rules |
| Dispute policies | Dispute Resolution Policy |
| DNSSEC | yes |
| Registry website | NIC.io |
The Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .io is nominally assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory.[1] The domain is operated commercially by Afilias, a domain name registry subsidiary of Ethos Capital.[2][3]
Google's ad targeting treats .io as a generic top-level domain (gTLD) because "users and webmasters frequently see [the domain] more generic than country-targeted".[4]
The .io domain was delegated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to British entrepreneur Paul Kane in 1997 together with the ccTLDs .ac (Ascension Island), .sh (St Helena), and .tm (Turkmenistan). Kane operated them for private benefit under the trade name "Internet Computer Bureau" from 1997 until 2017.[5] In 2014, Kane claimed that "profits are distributed to the authorities for them to operate services as they see fit" and that "Each of the overseas territories has an account and the funds are deposited there because obviously the territories have expenses that they incur and it's offsetting that." However the UK government has repeatedly stated that this is untrue: "There is no agreement between the UK Government and ICB regarding the administration of the .io domain" and "the Government receives no revenues from the sales or administration of this domain."[6][7] The first subdomain was registered under .IO in 1998, when Levi Strauss & Co. registered the domain levi.io.[8]
In April, 2017, Paul Kane sold the Internet Computer Bureau holding company to privately-held domain name registry services provider Afilias for $70.17m in cash.[9]
In December, 2020, Afilias' owner Hal Lubsen sold it to privately-held Donuts for an undisclosed sum.[2]
One month later, in January 2021, Donuts was acquired by private equity firm Ethos Capital, again for an undisclosed sum.[2]
In 2021, the United Nation's International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled that the United Kingdom has no sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, and that sovereignty instead belongs to Mauritius. This would extinguish the British Indian Ocean Territory, and the IO ISO-3166 two-letter country code and .io domain could also be extinguished. The United Kingdom disputes and does not recognise the tribunal's decision, so further legal processes are likely.[10][11] In 2022, the Mauritian government was considering how to progress the issue.[12]
In July 2021, the Chagos Refugees Group UK submitted a complaint to the Irish government against domain-name speculators Paul Kane and Ethos Capital subsidiary Afilias, seeking repatriation of the .IO ("Indian Ocean") country-code top-level domain and payment of back royalties from the $7m/year in revenue generated by the domain.[13] While attempts to repatriate top-level domains are not uncommon, this one is notable in that it cites consumer and human rights violations of the OECD's 2011 Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises rather than multistakeholder representation under ICANN policy, and because the .io domain has enjoyed commercial success, particularly among cryptocurrency companies, with more than 270,000 domains registered.[9][14][15]
Individuals and organisations are allowed to register .io domains.
Labels for .io domains may only contain alphanumeric characters and hyphens, and must be between 3 and 63 characters long. Domain names cannot begin or end with a hyphen symbol, and may not contain two consecutive hyphens. The entire domain name may not contain more than 253 characters.[16]
Applicants for the registration of .io domains do not need to be registered or established in the British Indian Ocean Territory. Third-level domains, such as "xyz.com.io", can only be registered by an inhabitant of the area. (Since there are no legal, permanent inhabitants of the British Indian Ocean Territory, theoretically no third-level domains will be registered.) Any second-level domains used by NIC.IO and top-level domains cannot be used as a third-level domain. For example, the domains "com.com.io", "org.com.io", and "biz.com.io" are all restricted.[17]
Domain names in .io may not be used, "for any purpose that is sexual or pornographic or that is against the statutory laws of any nation." If this requirement is breached, "NIC.IO reserves the right to immediately deactivate the offending registration."[18]
.io domains may be registered for a minimum of one year, and a maximum of 5 years.[19]
Domain names in .io are priced higher than those in many other TLDs. Registering an available .io-domain currently (as of 3 September 2020) costs US$90 per year.[18]
The .io domain is used almost exclusively for purposes unrelated to the British Indian Ocean Territory.
In computer science, "IO" or "I/O" is commonly used as an abbreviation for input/output, which makes the .io domain desirable for services that want to be associated with technology. .io domains are often used for open source projects, application programming interfaces ("APIs"), startup companies, browser games, and other online services.[20]
The TLD is also used for domain hacks, as the letters "io" are an ending of many English terms. For example, Rub.io is a shortened URL that was used for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign of Marco Rubio.
One reason given for the TLD's popularity is that it stands out by being shorter than other TLDs. Also, the .io TLD is less occupied than other TLDs, so it is more likely that a given term is available there.[21]
In Esperanto, io as an independent word is the assertive existential indefinite pronoun (English "something"). As a suffix, -io is used to terminate official names of countries or other kind of lands under which a community of people are grouped. The Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto includes almost 500 such terms, from Abisenio (Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia) to Zambio (Zambia). Derived from that, the suffix is also used to designate a community of people whose common interest is indicated by the suffixed root, especially in the term Esperantio, the community of speakers of the language and their culture as a whole, as well as the places and institutions where the language is used. As of May 2020, the esperant.io domain name redirects to Libera Folio, an independent generalist online bulletin written in Esperanto.
Around 2015 a multiplayer game, Agar.io, spawned many other games with a similar playstyle that used the .io domain, such as Diep.io, Slither.io, Surviv.io, and ZombsRoyale.io. Such games are collectively called ".io games".[22]
According to a 2014 Gigaom interview with Paul Kane, then chairman of the Internet Computer Bureau, the domain name registry is required to give some of its profits to the British government, for administration of the British Indian Ocean Territory.[23] After being questioned as a result of the interview, the British Government denied receiving any funds from the sale of .io domain names, and argued that consequently, the profits could not be shared with the Chagossians, the former inhabitants forcibly removed by the British government.[24][25]
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