GAO Rips USPS For Poor Annual Performance Reports
The U.S. Postal Service’s annual performance reports aren’t what they’re cracked up to be, according to new analysis by the General Accounting Office (GAO).
“We believe that some aspects of the service’s fiscal year 1999 performance report were not as straightforward and clearly stated as intended by the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA),” the GAO said in a 19 page report to Rep. John McHugh (R-NY), house postal subcommittee chairman.
The GPRA requires all federal agencies to file annual performance plans with Congress indicating both their goals and whether or not they have been met in the previous year.
The report by the investigative arm of Congress, “US Postal Service Enhancements Needed in Performance Planning and Reporting” (GGD-00-207) also stated that “some aspects of the [postal] service’s fiscal year 2001 preliminary performance plan were not as comprehensive as they had been in prior plans.”
It said that “certain aspects” of the fiscal 1999 performance report were “misleading” because of the postal service’s “portrayal of negative postal productivity as a strong positive result,” and the criteria for its 2001 goals “were unclear.”
According to the GAO the descriptions of strategies to accomplish certain results in fiscal 2001 “were incomplete and the information contained in prior years’ plans were carried forward into the current year’s without always being updated to reflect known or anticipated changes.”
Although the GAO expressed concern over the fiscal 2001 plan’s lack of baseline data on such things as the accuracy, consistency and on-time delivery of advertising (Standard A and B) mail, safety evaluations, the number of motor vehicle accidents per million miles driven, it did give the USPS credit for its efforts to present results, summarize performance and acknowledge the importance of performance goals.
While the USPS generally agreed with the GAO’s report, it said it was updating its performance report with new data relating to advertising mail delivery; change of address accuracy, resolving employee complaints, safety and plans to increase its $150 million corporate advertising to $270 million while reducing the cost for expedited supplies to $57 million from $81 million.
