The US Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced today a report it issued that shows poor execution on the part of postal management.
“The Postal Service’s implementation of operational changes and initiatives in June and July 2020 resulted in a significant drop in the quality and timeliness of mail delivery,” according to the report.
Management communicated changes and initiatives orally, “which resulted in confusion and inconsistent application of operational changes across the country.” In addition, it failed to implement the changes without analyzing the impact on mail service, even as the pandemic cases were rising.
As a result, there was a significant drop in mail service, the OIG wrote:
“The collective results of these initiatives, combined with the ongoing employee availability challenges resulting from the pandemic, negatively impacted the quality and timeliness of mail delivery nationally. The Postal Service’s mail service performance significantly dropped beginning in July 2020, directly corresponding to implementation of the operational changes and initiatives.”
Monday’s release included recommendations along with the USPS response to the OIG report, which it said had shortcomings.
An excerpt of management response follows: “At the outset, the main shortcoming of the report is that it lumps numerous operational initiatives together and then makes two broad assumptions that are not empirically supported.
“First, the report assumes that all of the initiatives were transformational or extraordinary measures that would likely impact service. As discussed in greater detail below that is not the case.
“Second, the document assumes that each of the initiatives covered in the report contributed to the service declines in mid-summer of 2020. This is also not empirically supported as discussed in more detail below.
“What is most problematic, however, is that these flawed assumptions factor directly into the recommendations in the report, several of which are therefore overbroad in certain respects.”
We first wrote about the new Postmaster General’s controversial and seemingly secretive directives on the July EcommerceBytes Blog on July 12th, followed up by this article on EcommerceBytes the following day.
You can find the release on the USPSOIG.gov website which includes a link to the full report.
