GAO Questions Some Postage Collection Practices
A new government report issued last week says the U.S. Postal Service still has no way of knowing whether its business mail acceptance units are collecting all postage on discounted bulk business mailings.
Two years after tightening its procedures of verifying various postage discounts claimed by bulk business mailers — catalogers, direct mailers and marketers — the USPS “lacks information on how well its controls are working and cannot ensure that it is collecting all the revenue due from its business mail operations,” the Government Accounting Office (GAO) said in a report to House postal subcommittee chairman, Rep. John McHugh (R-NY).
Although tighter controls and improved postage verification systems have resulted in a cumulative $56.6 million in additional revenue for the USPS ($26.5 million in fiscal 1998 and $30.1 million in fiscal 1999), the GAO said it found presorted mail verifications very often to be spotty. It also found that in many instances postal workers assigned to mail acceptance units were not adequately trained.
The GAO, noting that the USPS derives nearly half of its total annual income (about $30 billion) from bulk business mailers, said it could not determine if all of the procedural changes to the business mail acceptance program that were instituted two years ago were being followed systemwide “because data needed to make such a determination was not available.”
In its first review of the business mail acceptance program in 1996, the GAO determined the USPS was losing untold millions in revenue because it had no way of verifying the accuracy of the postage discounts claimed by mailers for bulk business mail.
It recommended a series of changes to the program that included: supervisory reviews of all mailer applications for postage discounts; regular reports to top postal officials about those reviews; and improved training for mail acceptance clerks and their supervisors.
There was no immediate comment from either postal officials or Rep. McHugh about the report.
