The Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Office of Retirement Services (RS) is the largest retirement organization in the United States, managing critical retirement services for millions of federal employees. In late 2020, OPM RS sought Team Coforma’s help to create a modernized version of the Federal Annuity Claims Expert System (FACES) that would meet people’s needs, preserve legacy knowledge, and offer a lasting framework for administering benefits in the future.
We’re excited to share that the updated retirement tool—Janus—made its production debut on March 15, 2025. Intentionally named after the Roman god of transitions, this mission-critical application will soon replace the primary functions of FACES: calculating retirement benefits and providing retirement benefit estimates for federal employees, as well as retrieving and collecting electronic retirement data from federal agencies.
“We're one of the early adopters of cloud services in general at OPM, which comes with difficulties. It also means we are paving the way for the modernization of OPM’s technology stacks,” says Ben Farley, Coforma’s engineering lead on the project. “It’s always a delicate dance to integrate with legacy systems while not disrupting those same systems. You have to find a balance: where to rebuild and do things differently and where to tie into the existing system.”
Reliable and easy for OPM to maintain, Janus is built with modern technology and deployed in OPM’s Azure cloud environment. Creating an application that OPM RS legal administrative specialists (LASs) can use efficiently—and depend on for accuracy—allows them to serve federal retirees, annuitants, and survivors by calculating their benefits correctly and in a timely manner. OPM manages retirement services for approximately 2.7 million annuitants. Last year, they processed 88,573 retirement claims.
“Janus is more than just a replacement for an outdated, legacy system,” says Monica Bassi, Coforma’s project delivery lead. “It’s an employee-centric solution, tailored specifically to meet the needs of the LASs and capable of scaling to handle increasingly complex federal retirement calculations.”
We’re grateful for the opportunity to support OPM in this endeavor along with our partners at various stages from Ad Hoc, Blue Tiger, Element Solutions, and Flexion. This work serves as an example of how technology modernization can truly improve the lives of both federal employees completing their day-to-day processes and the individuals they serve. We look forward to celebrating the full retirement of FACES and transition to Janus in the near future.
Disclaimer: This content was published independently of the Office of Personnel Management. This content does not constitute or imply an endorsement by the Office of Personnel Management or the United States Government of the product, process, or service, or its producer or provider. The perspectives presented here, or in any linked content or documents, do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Office of Personnel Management or the United States Government.