(Fort Belknap Agency, Mont.) – Senator Jon Tester today responded to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is reporting incomplete data about its mail delivery times.
Tester, a senior member of the Senate committee that oversees the Postal Service, requested the report to examine whether the USPS is meeting its service standards in rural states like Montana. USPS measures delivery performance against delivery service standards in order to ensure it is providing timely delivery to its customers.
According to the GAO report, the USPS is failing to measure almost half of its mail for on-time delivery performance. Additionally, the Congressional watchdog’s report found that locations not being measured-mostly rural areas such as Montana-lack basic equipment, such as barcodes and scanners, which are needed to make accurate measurements.
“Montanans tell me that there are serious delays in mail delivery, and yet time and time again the USPS tells me they’re doing great,” Tester said. “We clearly need better data that reflects what’s actually happening on the ground. This report confirms what many of us in rural America have been experiencing for years.”
In an effort to reduce costs, the USPS has closed or consolidated 141 mail processing facilities since 2012, including six in Montana. The new updated services standards have shifted mail volume away from overnight delivery and have replaced it with two-to-three day delivery.
In May, Senator Tester wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission expressing his concerns about the timeliness and accuracy of USPS reports following processing plant closures and consolidations across the country.
The GAO report, titled: “Actions Needed to Make Delivery Performance Information More Complete, Useful and Transparent” can be read online here.
GAO: USPS, PRC Needs to Make Mail Delivery Performance Information More Complete, Useful, and Transparent
Senator Carper on GAO Report: My Postal Reform Bill would require improvements to mail delivery performance nationwide
In Rolla Mo. the UBBM mail is 4-6 months old and in that are pieces of 1st class mail. UBBM is mail that is to be thrown away, but not before a clerk has a chance to go through each piece to collect said pieces of 1st class mail and get it back into the mail stream. Handbooks & manuals say that the mail WILL be gone through daily at the carrier cases to correct the carrier on such a problem of disposal of proper mail.
No Delays.. I’ve personally seen the DPS for the next day arrive at my station before I’ve clocked out. What does this mean?
All the collection mail that I’ve brought back will not be delivered the following day.
What we need is for those 535 bosses in Congress to get off their tushes and get busy running the USPS like intended ! HO,HO,HO Moe ! !
post office is doing the same thing as veterans administration………gaming the system data so they can get bonus money on phony numbers. stop the bonus scam and start putting these bureaucrats in Levenworth Federal Prison to break rock for road bed gravel. it will stop these criminals real fast. it is time to thin the govt agency herd……we need a 2016 Postal Deregulation Act just like democrat jimmy carter had the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act.
Postal managers don’t lie so this can’t be true.
Dear Senator Tester:
I have an answer to your inquiries. I’m not a Montanan but that doesn’t matter because the management in the USPS is one giant inept corrupt mess. It is with a jaundiced and experienced eye that I view GAO reports as bogus, simply because they in the postal division answer to the very people they are supposedly holding accountable. It is this fact that we get slanted viewpoints, passing all the blame on the letter carriers and clerks, and never hearing a single thing about mismanagement, from fiscal disasters to one of the most notoriously abusive leadership bodies in all of business and services today.
Many management personnel are falsifying their input to make their “numbers” look good. This means deliberately shorting the volumes of mail each route gets, and not doing a thorough job of counting packages to make the load appear lighter than it actually is, and then try to bully the carrier into making up the difference. It works with those who are not career employees or otherwise intimidated.
Other offices are telling their carriers to scan parcels as “delivered” before they ever leave the office for their routes. Not only is this dishonest, if somebody calls to ask about the status of a package or looks online it will show it was delivered when in reality it hadn’t been. So management not only deliberately falsifies numbers to try to intimidate employees, it blatantly lies to the customer in regard to the packages we deliver.
I can only imagine what other internal wrongdoing goes on, but I would wager it’s a huge amount, everywhere from payrolls, and I’ve seen carriers get shorted on paychecks due to management incompetence only to have to wait several weeks to get reimbursed, or have to file grievances for mileage or overnight stays on trips the Service sends them to, usually training.
There was a Federal lawsuit recently in the Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas area that involved many many office managers being instructed to destroy time clock records that showed overtime work performed.
You cannot and will not get honest information from management at any level. Anybody brave enough to be cooperative will be met with extreme recourse, usually removal for any idiotic excuse they can think up. One maintenance man in a greater St. Louis office was fired as a terrorist after informing OSHA about a suspected and later verified carbon monoxide leak management repeatedly refused to address.
Only when an independent agency is formed to truly investigate the wrongdoing and gross malfeasance of postal management will problems ever come close to being solved. You should approach the problem from this angle, because it’s the root cause of all the problems in the USPS. Remember, a carrier can be working fast as hell but management can cook those numbers to cover their asses and use them to bully said carrier. Only those seasoned enough to stand up to the abuse can escape the clutches of these people.
Since,Aug.1st.;before Queens,NY postal-customers receive their letters and flats,they are first sent 2 Manhattan,then DPS’ed FSM/FSS’ed in Brooklyn,before finally trucked 2 Queens stations 4 delivery. And,I am getting my magazines,as late the tenth of the dated month. A post-marked letter mailed from Queens now usually take three-days to make it 2 Queens;instead of ovetnight. And,it is one of the worlds’ best bets;that USPS will continue 2 get away with it. I got a better idea. Why not just do all this mail-processing in Manhattan,NY (Morgan)? They could then eliminate many High-Salaried management networked titles in the Brooklyn,NY,P&D.C. That would be a real money-saver. Is anyone reading this in Washington,D.C?
Before the bi consolidation the Post office would test them selves with live mail. we sent mail to and dropped mail in mail boxes threw-out our scf and even at times mail outside the scf to see how it was moving. Now we depend on outside companies that tell us what we want to hear and no longer test our selves. But if a customer complains we can look at the ID Tag to see what the path was threw the automation. The USPS should be policing it’s self before the problems show up. The district managers should be doing more than just going to meetings and collecting a big pay check.
do u believe Montanans or the USPS? I know who I believe!!