Building for federal defined contribution plans means tolerating zero ambiguity. Here's what that demands from your architecture.
Building for federal defined contribution plans means tolerating zero ambiguity. There is no graceful degradation. There is no 'close enough.' Every calculation must be exact, every transaction must be auditable, and every edge case must be handled before it reaches a beneficiary.
The Thrift Savings Plan serves over 6 million federal employees. The stakes of a miscalculated IFT or a misfiled loan aren't measured in customer churn — they're measured in retirement security. A single error at scale is a federal audit.
TSP compliance is not a checklist. It's a design constraint that permeates every layer of the system. Your data model must be able to answer: what was the exact fund allocation for participant X at timestamp Y? Not approximately. Exactly.
Interfund transfers are the highest-risk transaction in a defined contribution system. They move money between funds at market close prices that aren't known at the time of submission. The system must hold the request, confirm prices at close, execute precisely, and create an immutable audit record — all within the same business day.