USPS OIG: How Should the Postal Service Handle Improperly Prepared Mail?

A workshare discount is a postage discount provided to mailers for doing work normally performed by the Postal Service (presorting, barcoding, handling, or transporting mail). In general, the discount should not exceed the cost the Postal Service avoids when someone else performs the task. Improperly prepared workshare mail requires additional handling, which adds to the…

 Continue reading

Alas, poor post office: Newsweek broods on the demise of the Postal Service

Last week Newsweek ran an opinion piece entitled “Do We Need a Postal Service?” It originally appeared on the website of the Brookings Institute with the title, “The U.S. Postal Service’s existential problem.” “The U.S. Postal Service has an existential problem,” begins the op-ed, and twice more in the space of just 840 words it…

 Continue reading

USPS OIG Blog: Network Consolidation – It Takes Two … Phases

Reshaping a postal network doesn’t happen overnight. Especially one built to handle mainly letters and flats and not the tremendous anticipated growth in parcels. The Postal Service is attempting to tackle realignment in two phases, playing out over 4 years. Phase one was completed in 2013 and resulted in 141 consolidations for an expected cost…

 Continue reading

USPS Cost Cutting Ain’t Cuttin’ It, Mailers Group Says

February 9, 2015 From Flats Sequencing to Network Rationalization, many of the U.S. Postal Service’s recent cost-cutting programs have not been living up to the agency’s projections, a multi-industry mailers group says. Worse, the programs have shifted costs to mailers without apparently benefiting USPS, the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) wrote in a recent filing…

 Continue reading