Over half of the nation’s state attorneys general are urging the U.S. Postal Service to tighten its controls over Corporate Executive Centers (CEC’s).
Many direct marketers and mail monitoring companies use such commercial mail receivers to track decoy mailings and USPS delivery performance, while some small direct marketing firms and consultants list CEC’s as their official address.
The attorneys general of 30 states, Hawaii’s Office of Consumer Protection, Montana’s Commerce Department, and Washington, DC’s Corporation Counsel, all said in a letter to the USPS that the proposal “will open a major loophole in the law for those who wish to avoid address and informational requirements associated with CMRA’s (Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies).”
Last month the USPS proposed another amendment to its controversial CMRA rules that would require the registration of Corporate Executive Centers (CEC’s) as commercial mail receivers if tenants only use the location for mail and/or telephone services. It would also require mail addressed to CEC tenants as well as other commercial mail receivers to use the pound sign (#) as an alternative to the private mail box designation (PMB) designation the USPS originally proposed.
The letter also urged postal officials to “revise” their proposal by making use of the initials “PMB” mandatory and require CEC tenants conduct a “substantial” amount of business at the location with its own employee or employees on-site for a minimum of 20 hours a week. Those changes, they said, “would go a long way toward the goals of deterring fraud and prosecuting it when it occurs.”
There was no immediate comment on the letter from postal officials who, according to spokeswoman Monica Hand, “are reviewing the comments and expect to publish a decision [in the Federal Register] in about 90 days.”
The move was immediately scored by Gene A. Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce, and Rick Merritt, executive director of a watchdog group called Postal Watch.
The attorneys general comments, said Del Polito, “minimizes the black mark someone wears when they put PMB on a letter to a CEC or a CMRA. I don’t think a small business should suffer the stigma they [the attorneys general] want to apply to it.”
Merritt, blasting the Sorrell’s letter as “an affront on small business,” joined Del Polito in saying it appears that “the postal service has recruited various state attorneys general to in effect create a small business regulatory body [imposing] an undue burden on many of the smallest businesses in the country.”
The letter was signed by Vermont Attorney General William A. Sorrell on behalf of the attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, and the executive director of Hawaii’s Office of Consumer Protection, the director of Montana’s Department of Commerce and the Corporation Counsel’s office for the District of Columbia.
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