Utah Retirement Systems tells Legislature backlog in initial retirement payments stemmed from IT upgrade and staff turnover; fixes underway

Utah Retirement Systems told a Utah Legislature interim committee that delays in processing initial retirement payments this year resulted from a technology upgrade that drew subject-matter staff away from day-to-day processing and from higher-than-expected staff turnover.

The explanation came during a presentation by Dan Anderson, executive director of Utah Retirement Systems, who told the committee, “we, due to a confluence of issues … have fallen below the standards that we expect of ourselves and that our members and our stakeholders expect of us. And we own that.”

Anderson said the retirement application process remains largely manual because URS must assemble decades of personnel and payroll records from multiple data sources. He described the current quality-control practice as one in which “three different retirement calculator employees will go through” a file to ensure accuracy, and said that manual work combined with the pension-administration IT upgrade and unanticipated turnover in management and staff produced a backlog during the early months of 2025.

The nut graf: URS said its short-term response reduced the backlog substantially and that a new pension administration system — already in late-stage implementation — should shorten processing times further. The department described immediate steps taken to restore service and outlined a timeline for broader improvements.

Anderson told the committee URS enacted several short-term fixes as soon as the problem was identified: cross-training staff from other parts…