Quick Hits

*** The Office of Personnel Management is keeping pace with retirement claims among feds, according a recent data release. The inventory, or backlog, of retirement claims is diminishing, while the percentage of claims processed in 60 days or fewer has been holding steady for about 10 months. Retirement rates have been bouncing around throughout 2018, with a peak of 14,590 in January. A little less than half that number put in papers in November, when 7,510 submitted retirement claims. So far for calendar 2018, just over 97,000 federal employees submitted retirement claims.

*** The IRS updated a solicitation issued in June of this year for an artificial intelligence machine based analytical platform to specify use cases relevant to the tax agency. After months of market research, the IRS says it is looking to machine learning to probe patterns of "application-specific" financial data, to detect data leakage and to check for encrypted communications, to prevent bot attacks by focusing on the predictable behavior of human users rather than focusing on known bot signatures and to try to preempt attack by reading social media signals.