Posted on 09/06/2011 11:59:42 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
The US Postal Service could fully meet its financial obligations, extinguish debt and have substantial cash flow if Congress rectifies the organization's possible overfunding of its pension and retiree healthcare funds, the USPS' Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in a summary report.
The OIG has issued four reports in the past year on the Postal Service's possible overfunding of its pension funds and retiree healthcare fund. One report found that the USPS has overpaid the Civil Service Retirement System by about $75 billion since 1972 because of an outdated calculation method. Another report found that if the Postal Service is allowed to prefund its pension obligations at levels benchmarked to private-sector companies, it could recover more than $50 billion.
“If our proposals to recover the overfunded amounts were placed in effect, the Postal Service could potentially recover $142.4 billion,” the OIG summary report stated.
The report said that if the overfunding is rectified, the Postal Service would no longer be required to prefund the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund by about $5.6 billion a year. It could prefund pensions and retirees' health benefits at benchmarked levels and pay existing retirees' health insurance premiums from the retiree health fund. It could also extinguish its $10 billion debt to the US Treasury Department.
The proposals also could provide significant cash for operations, the OIG said in the report.
Postmaster General John Potter said last week that the Postal Service expects to report a $6 billion loss for fiscal year 2010, with about $5.5 billion of that loss due to its statutorily required payment into the Retiree Health Benefits Fund. Without that payment, the USPS had a $500 million operating loss in FY 2010 despite a drop in mail volume of about 7 billion pieces.
The issue of how to fund the Postal Service's long-term liabilities is expected to play out on Capitol Hill in either a lame-duck session of this Congress or with a new Congress next year.
Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE) recently introduced a comprehensive postal reform bill that would permanently address the pension and retiree health benefit issues. In its decision to reject the USPS' proposed “exigent” rate increases for 2011, the Postal Regulatory Commission cited the aggressive retiree health benefits payment schedule as a structural problem causing the Postal Service's liquidity crisis.
Yep, the mail doesn't move itself. Arguments can be made about level of compensation and pensions, but most postal work is pretty heavy work. I wish some of the critics could have seen the action at my old GMF at 4:30AM with only 30 minutes to go until time to get the next dispatch out.
One of the oddities about the job that you don’t expect is the constant time pressure. That silly quote of Newman’s from the Seinfeld show “the mail never stops!” tells me that one of the writers knew what it was like to work there.
I worked again as a clerk during the Christmas rush. It was the late afternoon-night shift. UPS was on strike that year so the Post Office was deluged with parcels. One of the clerks would climb up to the top of a giant metal multi-sided “pyramid”, and a couple of us would pile packages onto a conveyor belt leading up to him. He would sort them by zip code, each side of the pyramid being a different zip.
Another odd feature of postal facilities is the inspector’s galleries. Those give you the creeps the first time you realize what they are.
I’m sure all those package delivery companies and the internet are going to go away so it can be just like the good old days. 570,000 employees and they don’t know where to cut to balance their budget.
One day we actually heard noise from the inspector's gallery. Even though you were doing nothing wrong, it's still an unnerving sensation.
The design was changed and the water tight seals were replaced.
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