When you're setting the retirement date for an individual, you can either use a worklife expectancy based on data tables provided by the application, or you can manually enter the individual's retirement age. When you manually enter a retirement age, the application calculates the Years to Retirement. While the Worklife Expectancy is based on the Reference Date, the Years to Retirement is based on the current date. So unless the Reference Date matches the current date, the Worklife Expectancy and the Years to Retirement will differ. The difference between the two will equal the difference between the current date and the Reference Date.
You select the Reference Date used to calculate the Worklife Expectancy from the Advance Options page or the Options page: