The following is excerpted from USPS OIG Report FF-MA-09-002:

Employees have made, and are continuing to make, imprudent and unnecessary purchases during a time of severe economic uncertainty in the Postal Service. While such purchases are generally not in direct violation of Postal Service policies, they conflict with the Postal Service’s objective of driving down costs in all operations and processes. Moreover, the public’s view of such imprudent purchases could have a detrimental effect on the Postal Service’s public image due to the perception that the
agency is using funds from sales of stamps to purchase expensive items.

Imprudent Purchases Made by Postal Service Employees

Employees have made purchases, primarily gifts and items for meetings, which we believe are imprudent and unnecessary during a time of severe economic uncertainty in the Postal Service. In a recent report on the Postal Service’s progress in the areas of network strength, realignment planning, accountability, and improved communication, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated the Postal Service “must increase efficiency and decrease costs across all its operations” in order to respond to declining mail volumes. In addition, the Vice President, Controller, has directed employees to “continue efforts to control expenses” by making “prudent choices and deferring or eliminating non-critical activity.” Some examples of imprudent purchases we identified follow.

Employees put these purchases into the eAwards System (eAwards):

1. Electronic and household items such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS), navigational systems, video game consoles, camcorders, digital cameras, personal computers, printers, an espresso machine, and a TiVo® system given as employee awards/recognition, purchased in late fall 2007, and costing a total of $93,234.

2. Thirteen 23-inch high-definition televisions given as employee awards, purchased in fall 2007, and costing $6,435.

3. Three designer watches given as employee awards, purchased in fall 2007, and costing $4,370.

Employees did not put these purchases into eAwards:

4. Carnival type games and amusements for an employee appreciation and family day event, purchased in fall 2007, and costing $7,995. Cardholders are not required to put purchases related to employee appreciation into eAwards.

5. A 2-day year-end meeting held in November 2007 by one area costing $26,884, including the cost of breakfast, lunch, and dinner; meeting rooms; audio-visual equipment; and incidentals such as baggage handling and gratuities for 60 people. The purchase included lodging for 14 attendees whose duty station was less than 50 miles from the meeting place. Cardholders were not required to put these purchases into eAwards since this was a business meeting and not an employee recognition award event.

6. Tickets for sporting events, purchased in late fall 2007 and winter 2008, costing a total of $28,498. These purchases included a professional basketball game that 450 employees attended and where they received food and hats, and season tickets for a major league baseball team. Cardholders were not required to put these purchases into eAwards because the per ticket cost was less than $50.

We found the documentation supporting the purchases listed above and others did not always provide sufficient detail to identify the number of items purchased, the number of people attending events or recognized for awards, or the specific purpose or reason for the purchase. Without extensive testing, it is not possible for management or the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG) to determine the extent to which some of these purchases (i.e., events) occur because they are not always tracked separately.

Items of value – such as GPS and navigational systems, electronic appliances, watches and gift cards – are captured in eAwards. Some of the purchases we identified – tickets to sporting events, business meetings and appreciation days – are associated with recognition or events; therefore, they are not required to be put into eAwards. As cited in a recent OIG report, expenses associated with internal and external events (meals, refreshments, employee recognition gifts, gift cards, et cetera) should be separately tracked to facilitate transparency and accountability.

In addition to the types of purchases noted above, we identified spending for food and meals made using Purchase Cards totaling over $7 million in FY 2008. However, we did not include specific examples in our report, as the Postal Service recognized the need to strengthen its policy in this area and recently issued a management instruction that provides additional guidance. The Postal Service travel policy states that anyone in travel status must deduct all meals provided from their per diem expense. Managers told us that meals are provided only under specific circumstances, often to
ensure that people in travel status are available for a meeting for the maximum amount of productive time. We plan to continue to monitor these purchases throughout FY 2009 to determine whether the new management advisory is effective.

Although most of the purchases we tested were not in violation of Postal Service purchasing procedures, the nature of the purchases is in direct conflict with the Postal Service’s objective of driving down costs in all operations and processes. In addition, due to the perception that the Postal Service is using funds from stamp sales to purchase expensive items, this kind of imprudent spending could damage the Postal Service’s public image (goodwill). Both managers and those with awards approval authority should consider the costs of the awards and the perception of these awards to
outside individuals. The imprudent purchases we identified represent items of value that are above and beyond employee salaries and bonuses.

We believe a reduction in purchases is feasible based on our analysis of Purchase Card data from October 2006 through September 2008. In fact, chart 1 shows that in Quarter 4, FY 2008, purchases decreased to an average of $24 million per month, down from an average of nearly $32 million per month for the first 9 months of FY 2008. We believe this is due to a recent emphasis on cost cutting, and further reductions are possible to realize additional cost savings by emphasizing the need to limit the amount of spending on non-cash items.

ATLANTA, Feb. 25, 2009 – UPS (NYSE:UPS) has expanded its early morning delivery territory in the United States by almost 3,000 new ZIP Codes, an increase that brings to more than 23,000 the number of ZIP Codes with guaranteed early morning delivery service.

The increase in coverage area for UPS Next Day Air® Early A.M.® means that UPS now delivers early – by 8:30 a.m. – to more businesses and ZIP Codes than any other transportation carrier. In addition, UPS delivers overnight by 10:30 a.m. to more businesses and ZIP Codes than anyone.

With the increase, more than 80 percent of U.S. businesses can receive early morning deliveries, which arrive up to two hours before UPS’s regular guaranteed overnight service at 10:30 a.m. In some areas, arrival time can be guaranteed as early as 8 a.m.

“Early morning delivery is crucial for customers who have urgent deadlines or critical shipments across time zones, from hospitals needing supplies in time for morning surgeries to lawyers needing signed documents for legal proceedings,” said Dale Hayes, UPS’s vice president of U.S. marketing. “Offering more early morning service choices is a fundamental way that UPS is meeting customer needs.”

UPS was the first express carrier to offer early morning delivery service nearly 13 years ago, responding to customers with expanding infrastructures and more complex supply chains as well as more widely dispersed workforces and customers. Saturday service also is available to certain destinations.

A complete list of the UPS Next Day Air Early A.M. ZIP Codes is available on UPS.com. Plans are underway to offer the service to even more ZIP Codes later this year.

Columbia, South Carolina – United States Attorney W. Walter Wilkins stated today that Diane T. Williams, age 38, of Lamar, South Carolina, was indicted for theft by a postal employee. Federal officials allege that Williams stole postal funds while working at the Hartsville Post Office from June 2007 to June 2008.

The maximum penalty Williams could receive is a fine of $250,000.00 and imprisonment for 10 years.
Mr. Wilkins stated that the case was investigated by agents of the United States Postal Service and that he has assigned the case to Assistant United States Attorney William E. Day, II of the Florence office for prosecution.

From the NALC Bulletin:

Let Let me make the following clear to one and all, including Postal Service management at headquarters and in the field, and all letter carriers, at every level in the union and in every post office: No one, at any level, has any authority to amend or violate the national contract, period.

I continue to receive calls from branch officers who inform me that local managers have approached them and attempted to secure agreements to violate the national contract. These same managers have the audacity to suggest that I am cooperating with the Postal Service and that they should, too!

The plain fact is that I encourage cooperation with the Postal Service because I realize the current financial crisis requires cooperation, where appropriate.

If any manager approaches you with a suggestion for creative ooperation, advise them to send their ideas to USPS headquarters, which will then make the determination whether to present such ideas to us. Some of the ideas floating around now are not grounded in common sense. For example, the idea of prohibiting all carriers from working their nonscheduled day off, and then requiring non-ODL carriers to work overtime is a clear violation of the contract – one we will stop through the grievance procedure, and one that will cost the USPS dearly in the end. We must be mindful of the critical difference between contract amendment/contract violation on the one hand, and creative, positive cooperation on the other.

From Postcom.org:

Bill Galligan, USPS senior vice president of operations, told a Mailers Technical Advisory Committee group the Postal Service will be moving forward on its network re-engineering effort to transform its existing Bulk Mail Center network into one with Network Distribution Centers. The Postal Service plans to begin implementing the NDC concept in the Northeast Area as early as April.

And from the Postal Affairs Blog:

More details on this Network Reengineering, from Mr. Galligan’s presentation at MTAC-

Transformation of Bulk Mail Centers (BMC) to Network Distribution Centers (NDC)
>Consolidate originating volumes to achieve end to end efficiencies
>Combine BMC & Surface Transfer Center (STC) containerization and dispatch plans to eliminate redundant networks and improve transportation utilization
>Leverage multiple trailer loading and dispatching techniques (tandems/triples) to further improve trailer utilization
>Aligns induction of originating products into one ground network
>Three tiers of NDCs will exist
>Phase I implementation begins in the Northeast

In a filing with the Postal Regulatory Commission this week, the USPS announced a $751 million net loss for the month of January, almost double the $384 million lost in the first three months of the fiscal year which began October 1, 2008. That puts the estimated year to date loss at over $1.1 billion with eight months still to go in the fiscal year. It also announced that mail volume in January was down 16% from January 2008. That seems to indicate that the drop in volume is accelerating, as volume in the first three months was down 9.3%.

The text of the 8K report:

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) previously announced a loss for the quarter ending December 31, 2008, in an 8K filed on February 9, 2009. USPS discloses that its unaudited January 2009 financial results were an estimated $5.80 billion in revenue and $6.55 billion in expenses, resulting in an estimated net loss of $751 million. This loss compares to a loss of $44 million in January 2008, which resulted from total revenue of $6.58 billion and total expenses of $6.62 billion. Mail volumes declined by over 16% in January 2009 from January 2008. The January results continue to illustrate that the downward pressure on the Postal Service business continues into 2009.

From the NAPUS Hotline:

Need to Know: On February 13, 2009 Anthony J. Vegliante, Executive Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer notified by letter to the “field’ that the policy regarding casual rate of pay is being changed due to the current economic and business climate. The new casual appointments are to be now paid at a rate that is at least $1 less than the previously established rate of pay for each position within your facility.

If you haven’t read the original newspaper story about Lucky and the mailman, it’s located here.

If you have read it, you know it ended with a bit of a cliff-hanger: did Mr. Donovan get his old route back? Did Lucky ever see him again?

We can now reveal the true answers to those questions: No! and more importantly, YES!

Arthur Donovan apparently didn’t ever get his old route back, but he did retire less than a year after the transfer. And what did he do as soon as he retired? Started visiting his old friend Lucky every day. The story of Arthur and Lucky’s reunion was a national story, just like the original story the year before. This clipping is from a Corpus Christi newspaper.

From the Denver Mailhandlers Local 321 website:

The Postal Service is soliciting medical releases for those employees that are required to partake in the 2nd and 3rd opinion process. In doing so, the FMLA Coordinators are requiring employees to release the “specified information” to the USPS Law Department. Specifically, the USPS is requesting access to:

Any and all records regarding treatment, including but not limited to, all current and past medical treatment, aliments and/or conditions (sic);

Other: Stress, Psychological and/or Medical Disorders, Aliments, Conditions (sic) to include a copy of complete chart, progress notes & interview notes, discharge summaries, operative reports, x-ray & all imagery, laboratory tests, pathology tissue, and all diagnostic studies whether in electronic data or other format.

The Local Union has filed a complaint with the Department of Labor, and we have asked Senator Udall to intervene. We are also addressing the issue at the National level. The request seems highly improper. What legal purpose does the Law Department have with sensitive, private and personal medical information? Is the Law Department going to review x-rays and pathology tissue? The USPS letter goes on to assert that the information sought is the “minimum necessary” to accomplish the intended purpose of the request. There is nothing minimal about the information being sought. It is the Postal Service’s customary and routine practice to request everything.

Hopefully we will have this resolved quickly. Until then, we need to have every mail handler that is pushed to a 2nd and/or 3rd opinion (and required to sign the referenced medical release) to file a complaint with the DOL. The Union can assist you with this. It is nothing more then a simple letter written to:

Denver Colorado District Office Martin Barrow, District Director
US Department of Labor ESA Wage & Hour Division 1999 Broadway, Suite 2445
Denver, CO 80202-5712

Those that are affected and do file complaints should remind the DOL that the USPS will likely terminate their FMLA (for refusing to sign and return the medical release) asserting non-cooperative with the 2nd/3rd opinion process. They should ask for appropriate extensions until their complaint is addressed. Additional information will be posted as this situation develops.

Two and a half months after we (and postalmag.com) told you about the PMG’s $857K paycheck for 2008, George W. Bush’s favorite journal, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times “newspaper” has what it calls an “EXCLUSIVE” telling you, umm… basically what we said back in November…

EXCLUSIVE: Postmaster got $800,000 in pay, perks
Moonie Times