The Office of the Inspector General for the United States Postal Service has recommended the Lehigh Valley Processing and Distribution Center update its operations plan after an audit stemming from complaints of late mail delivery.

The inspector general’s recently completed audit of the center’s operations, said hundreds of thousands of mail pieces were delayed.

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the Postal Service experiencing decreased employee availability and an increased package volume. The report says it contributed to not only the Lehigh Valley center’s processing problems, but to distribution centers nationwide.

In a detailed, 15-page report, the inspector general recommended the center needs to train managers and process late arriving managed mail; identify and address the root causes of the late arriving mail; and update the operations plans that had not been revised and improved since 2016.

The equipment

In January 2019, the Postal Service launched a Mail Condition Visualization application within Informed Visibility to provide near real-time visibility of a facility’s on-hand, advanced and delayed volumes.

MCV uses sorting machine scans of mailpiece barcodes and calculates delayed mail based on the number of mail pieces that did not receive the next expected processing operation scan on-time.

The post office uses a Delivery Point Sequence, an automated process that sorts mail by carrier routes into delivery order and managed mail originating from other processing locations that requires additional processing before delivery.

Based on an audit for the period of Jan. 1 of that year through Aug. 31, 2020, the application reported about 605 million delayed mail pieces, or 32.2 percent of the total pieces handled at this facility, although the auditors were unable to determine all of the causes for the delayed mail because scan information was unavailable to them.

While onsite at the Lehigh Valley P&DC from Oct. 5-8, 2020, inspectors observed a large quantity of nonmachinable outside priority mail packages on the inbound dock. They said management told them they were sending these packages to the Scranton P&DC for processing due to employee availability issues at the Lehigh Valley center.

However, on Oct. 6, 2020, a press release from the office of U.S. Senator Bob Casey reported about 30 to 35 large mail containers loaded with priority mail dating as far back as Sept. 17, 2020, had been rerouted from the Lehigh Valley P&DC and were sitting at the Scranton P&DC.

As a result of this messaging, Lehigh Valley P&DC management decided to stop sending nonmachinable outside priority mail packages to the Scranton P&DC and instead committed to staffing additional employees and allocating overtime to process them at the Lehigh Valley P&DC.

Against the flow

The inspector general said the performance audit was conducted from September 2020 through April 2021. It was determined the Lehigh center management was not processing the managed mail according to its designed flow, which caused the MCV to improperly report that volume as delayed mail, and management was not following Postal Service Headquarters guidance for the designed flow of managed mail. Instead, the facility was processing this mail on a sort plan, which resulted in it being sent to delivery units without all processing operations at the facility being completed.

The auditors said this resulted in the MCV application not accurately reporting delayed mail for processing operations, including Delivery Point Sequence and incoming managed mail letters at the facility. When a mail piece does not receive an expected operational scan, MCV will report it as delayed.

As a result, management was unable to accurately determine the actual amount of delayed mail at the Lehigh Valley P&DC.

The report states the Lehigh Valley P&DC received managed mail from other facilities after the critical entry time, which is the last time mail can be received and processed on-time to meet service standards.

It states plant management was aware of the late arriving mail and communicated with the respective facilities from which this mail originated, but did not identify the root causes or take action to resolve the issue. This resulted in the mail being at risk of not being delivered on-time.

Although the center’s operating plan is considered to be outdated, inspectors said they did not observe the outdated plan contributing to delayed mail.