Postal Travelers Spending at Tour d'France Questioned

Forget Enron, WorldCom, and the other public companies who cooked their books and, as a result, emptied stockholders' pockets.

The powers to be at the USPS, not only cooked the books, but they also barbecued, deep fried, grilled and everything else known to man, in their accounting and reporting of their sponsorship of Lance Armstrong's Tour de France bicycle team since 1997.

Is this why the USPS continues to lose more than a billion dollars every year? Enron and WorldCom went bankrupt. Uncle Sam has bigger pockets to bail the post office out when periodic rate increases don't cover all the losses.

Maybe Congress or a Presidential commission will answer the question in 2003. The losers of course are all taxpayers and letter writers.

Freedom Of Information - After more than four months of requesting all pertinent material from the postal service under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in connection with its cycling sponsorship from 1997 through 2002, two basic conclusions can be drawn from the hodge podge of documents received by The Lake Worth Herald and Observer newspapers.

1. The USPS's bookkeeping efforts would fail any school's accounting 101 class. 2. Postal executives live well when they travel.

Following The Lake Worth Herald and Observer newspapers' FOIA requests August 9 and September 6, the post office sent a half- inch stack of documents in October that an experienced forensic accountant would throw up his/her hands trying to understand. Very few pages were alike.

One can only imagine what the Internal Revenue Service would do to a company who reported its numbers in a like fashion.

Finally, responding to a third newspaper request for additional material and clarification, the USPS sent another 100 pages or so on November 18 that tried to explain the original submission and correct some information from documents previously received.

While we were trying to make sense out of the latest information, the post office sent an additional batch of material Nov. 25 they found in one of the Federal Records Centers in California.

When one compares the first batch of papers to subsequent papers, conflicting reports turn up. We have not decided whether the USPS's reporting is due to ineptness in their accounting practices or a deliberate attempt to hide expenses in their sponsorship program.

The Puzzle As we start putting the pieces of the puzzle together, here are a few highlights from 2001:

* On July 3, 2001, then Vice President of Sales Gail Sonnenberg and her husband flew to Geneva, one day after the USPS raised postal rates. During less than one month, she expensed nearly $20,000 to the post office for two roundtrip flights and $1,020 a day hotel charges among other expenditures.

* George Hurst, sales, along with his wife, expensed $7,237 in less than one month invoicing hotel charges of $198 and $187 for the same day, July 13. Two weeks later he was in the Marriott Hotel at $335.

* Sales executive David Mastervich was in Paris, July 26-29 racking up $4,341 in expenses.

* John Kelly, president of package services, spent some $8,000 in one week led by $6,000 in airfare and a $364 a-day hotel.

And This Year After two more postal rate increases, the USPS team took off to Paris in 2002. From expense reports, we have been able to pull out the following:

* Roundtrip airfares for the USPS contingent from the U. S. to Paris ran as low as $770 and as high as $6,700 and everywhere in between.

* Acting Vice President of Sales Michael Jordan and his wife spent $1,100 a day for five days at the Marriott Hotel in Paris on top of substantial food charges at Paris' finest restaurants, a side trip to Luxembourg, a $260 dinner cruise, adding up to more than $25,000 over a one month period. His airfare was $6,047 and $5,900 for two trips he made during the period.

* Anita Bizotto, chief marketing officer, expensed $16,685 in one month in Paris and Grenoble, including, nearly $6,000 for hotel, over $2,000 for lunches and dinners and a $259 dinner cruise.

* Public Affairs Specialist Greg Allen spent $8,269 over a couple of weeks while only spending $796 on airfare.

* Public Affairs Specialist Joyce Carrier spent nearly $11,000 in 19 days. Her hotel was $551 a day.

* Alixe Johnson, sales department, had cheap airfare of $770 but still managed to spend almost $8,000 in one week.

Our preliminary conclusion: Neither snow, nor rain, nor sleet of day will stop some postal workers from living high on the hog in Paris in fancy hotels, haute cuisine restaurants, dinner cruises and upgraded air travel.

On the surface this looks like an honest article. On the other hand, if you look closely the reporter tells you what the USPS employee's credit card expense total was, but not what the expenses were.

For all anyone knows these were "group" expenses for conference rooms, lunches and so forth.

Next time the reporter ought to ask somebody who understands the US Government credit card process to help them out.

Now, as far as this being news, most of the folks named here have been fired in a RIF, or have been downgraded in the same RIF. Anita Bizzotto was promoted! Typically, however, the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) has a short tenure!

These omissions and misleading statements suggest that both the Lake Worth Herald and Postal Watch are heavily influenced by organizations with an agenda not necessarily in conformance with the public's best interest. Still, it's kind of fun to see the "mighty" brought low, eh?!

Maybe it would help if you went to the postalwatch.org website and read the archives of the past two years or so. Or go to the Lake Worth Herald paper's website and read their series of articles on the postal services problems, obfuscations and sheer incompetence.

Sorry to disillusion you but the postalwatch.org website and organization was put together by people who were reacting to the USPS's heavy handed regulations trying to put their "competition" out of business- that is, the mom 'n pop private mailbox businesses.

The Lake Worth Herald has been doing some rather good investigative reporting - if that even exists anymore in the snooze media - on the UPSP's local mismanagement, and then on the millions on top of millions thrown away on the Tour de France sponsorship, among other things.

Basically, if you do a little research, you will find that all of this information is quite authentic, quite factual and quite revealing- and *very* complete. The USPS is a wasteful bureaucracy completely out of control. And neither postalwatch.org nor the Lake Worth Herald really have a dog in the fight- they are actually trying to bring some light to the hidden waste.

"These omissions and misleading statements suggest that both the Lake Worth Herald and Postal Watch are heavily influenced by organizations with an agenda not necessarily in conformance with the public's best interest."

And can you show me anything in the realm of possibility where the USPS should be spending even one dollar sponsoring a sporting event that takes place totally outside of the US, has no relation whatsoever to the USPS or its mission, and costs millions of dollars when the USPS is bleeding red ink to the tune of billions (yes... that's billions with a "B") in deficits.

Why does it seem, with your quick (mis)reading of one short article, that the postalwatch.org and the newspaper "are heavily influenced by organizations with an agenda not necessarily in conformance with the public's best interest"? I've not seen that during the several years of reading the information and articles posted by the two organizations. In fact, I've seen just the opposite. They are far from "tainted" by anything *but* the public's best interest.

If you want to spend your money sending USPS management and their families and cronies to Europe to watch a bicycling race, be my guest. If you want to pay that extra 3 cents to mail your letter, be my guest. If you want a pseudo-government agency who answers to nobody and screws over the public, businesses and its employees while claiming that "the law doesn't apply to us", then you are more mentally challenged than your post indicates.

Go read up on several years worth of factual research before you make unwarranted assumptions about the two organizations motivations. And if you are a USPS troll, just go away.

misleading statements

You mean like "taxpayers money?"

Muawiyah, the following rant is not directed toward you.

//begin rant//
The only money USPS gets from taxpayers is to recover the lost postage
from non-profit and congress critters franked mail.
Congress mandates both of those.
Facts shouldn't interfere with a good old "hate USPS" thread though.
Maybe the 5 cent per e-mail postal tax urban myth can be floated again too.

Bottom line: If you don't like the USPS, don't buy stamps,
and take down your mail box.
There is no law which requires anyone to send or receive mail.
If you don't like non-profits getting a break in postage,
or congress getting free mail, yell at your congress critter.

//end rant// I agree the behavior of Postal management spending money
on anything other than providing good mail service is a
dispicable waste of the business' money.

Oh, give me a break. I don't think George Miller would agree with you for a second. As a matter of fact the whole thing started when one of the more left-wing members of the Postal Service Board of Governors was pressured by his wife to eliminate the "secrecy" underwhich clients of the private delivery box businesses work.

If I may guess at her real motive, it was to "surface" Right to Life agents so that her friends in the abortion business could track them down and harrass them with groundless lawsuits.

This whole business was worked hand in glove with the Jim Moran legislative initiative which made the identities of holders of various vehicle licenses SECRET and unaccessible to the general public. The reason there was to keep Right to Life agents from discovering who the people were who parked cars at abortion mills around the country.

What you guys ought to be doing is demanding that all personnel in Postal management or on the Board of Governors with close personal affiliations with the abortion industry be removed from office. Unfortunately the funding organization behind all of this, United Parcel Service, is in thrall to the Teamsters Union which is, of course, a serious part of the Democratic Party/abortion industry in the United States.

That's probably why so many Postal Watch and Lake Worth exposes of USPS have been so off the target. It is clear none of those people ever even attempt to locate and talk to postal insiders who could verify some of the information they use in their articles.

NOTE: I have, of course, read ALL of those articles as they have appeared.

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