About 230 feet below the Pennsylvania surface is an underground limestone mine just north of Pittsburgh, which serves as the workplace to 600 government employees and a prime location to house 28,000 file cabinets of federal paper records.

The employees' task is to process the retirement papers of government workers... entirely by hand and nearly all on paper, the Washington Post reported.

Employees for the Office of Personnel Management pass along thousands of case files from one cavern to another as they key in retirees' personal information, one line at a time.

James W. Morrison Jr. oversaw the retirement-processing system during Ronald Reagan's presidency. He reminisced to the Post in a phone interview about the nightmares of working without an automated system and was surprised to hear the system hadn't changed.

"The need for automation was clear ­-- in 1981," Morrison recalled. "After a year, I thought, 'God, my reputation will ruined if we don't fix this."

Trying to change from the manual system to an automated one has certainly been tested by the government in the past, but too many problems arose that it kept going back to using an all paperwork system.

For example, the rollout of HealthCare.gov has seen a number of glitches since last fall and the Census Bureau tried using hand-held computers but reverted back to paper, which ended up costing $3 billion more.

Even the Department of Veterans Affairs used an online records system but was abandoned after auditors feared the floor would collapse because it had accumulated a lot of paperwork in one office.

According to the Post, administrations in the last 30 years have spent more than $100 million in efforts to automate the out-dated process but have failed to make the process run at the speed of computers.

In the Pennsylvania mine situation, retirees have had to wait months before receiving their full benefit checks and efforts to speed up the process has placed costs on the taxpayer.

President Barack Obama's administration increased the amount of helping hands by at least 200 employees in the last five years while the cost of processing each claim has also increased from $82 to $108, the Post reported.

OPM Director Katherine Achuleta said in a statement issued Saturday that her priority is to modernize the system.

"I do not believe that the current level of service is acceptable," she said.