[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 36 (Friday, March 25, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 25, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       U.S. POSTAL SERVICE AUDITS

  Mr. COVERDELL. Mr. President, not long ago the Senate adopted a very 
important amendment that was offered by myself and Senator Pryor of 
Arkansas. That amendment dealt with a very important subject to the 
people of the United States that specifically dealt with the actions on 
the part of the U.S. Postal Service and the procedures by which it was 
interacting with private businesses in our country.
  I am pleased to be here this evening to report on a major event that 
relates to the resolution that was adopted by the Senate. The Senate 
said that it was its sense that the U.S. Postal Service should cease 
and desist from a practice by which the Postal Service was sending out 
auditors. And ``they were,'' the Postal Service says, ``in a voluntary 
interaction between businesses and the Postal Service.''
  Many of these private companies felt otherwise. They saw it as an 
intimidating practice to audit the business about its practices of 
using private carriers. We all know who those are. We have seen the 
purple plane, Federal Express, and the brown and gold of UPS--and there 
are hundreds of others of them.
  The Postal Service was saying that you could only use this private 
carrier if it was urgent. It had to be an urgent matter to use the 
private carrier. And you had to pay more for it. They were claiming 
that these private companies were not meeting that standard, and they 
were charging them, they say, prospectively. The bottom line, it is a 
fine. It was a punishment in the judgment of the Postal Service. They 
were the sole determinant as to whether or not the matter being mailed 
was urgent or not.
  I thought that was inappropriate. I did not believe the Postal 
Service had the authority to do this under the law. It was a judgment 
on their part of expanded regulation. I thought it was exceedingly 
complicated for a private carrier to know what these rules were or were 
not. I did not believe the Postal Service had done anything to educate 
the public with regard to this standard that they are were imposing.
  After inquiry, we asked just how many of they companies have been 
audited. It turns out it was about 41 over the past 5 years that they 
had levied, I call it fines, against. They called it agreed-to sums of 
over $1 million. I just did not think they had the authority. When you 
look at the amount of money that they had raised from the audits, it 
was insignificant in terms of their revenues. So about the only thing 
the Postal Service was accomplishing was a black eye.
  The Postal Service was damaging its own public relations. Obviously, 
it did not have the money nationwide to conduct broad audits. It was 
not raising enough money from the fines to make any difference, and the 
only thing that happened was the American public had one more reason to 
lose confidence in the U.S. Postal Service.
  So the resolution said--the Senate said: Stop doing that until we can 
take a look at it, us, the Congress, to see whether we can verify for 
ourselves that, yes, you have the right or, no, you do not. So this 
week Senator Pryor of Arkansas, who chairs the Subcommittee on Federal 
Services, which includes Post Office and Civil Service--and the ranking 
Member on our side is Senator Stevens of Alaska--was holding their 
annual meeting to hear from the Postal Service. The Postmaster General, 
Marvin Runyon, was present.
  I outlined my concerns that you do not have the authority, you are 
not earning enough revenue, you have not educated the public, and this 
is a practice that should be stopped. Then came the turn of Mr. Runyon 
to express himself. I think that it is important to the Senate and to 
the American public that Mr. Runyon said that the Postal Service would 
no longer instigate in its enforcement division these types of audits.
  So the effort on the part of the Senate, without legislation, has 
indeed resulted in a very positive event, a positive decision on the 
part of the U.S. Postal Service, so American business can now 
concentrate on running its businesses and not on trying to understand 
all the ramifications and implications of remote regulations to try to 
determine for a business whether or not its mail was urgent or not.
  I want to publicly thank the Postmaster General and his colleagues 
for hearing and adhering to the sense of the Senate, for thinking this 
through, and for coming to a very appropriate and valid decision, 
whereby everybody will be a winner. Their public relations will 
improve, they can concentrate on what they need to be working on, and 
they can get about the business of doing business.
  One of the reasons that I felt they should cease and desist from the 
activity is because I thought it was virtually moot and that they were 
behind the curve in terms of the way people communicate. In our 
exchange, I pointed out that in my Senate office, we receive 500 to 
1,000 letters a day. But, equally important, I receive almost 1,000 
faxes a day. And we receive hundreds of computer messages a week. I 
asked the Postmaster General during the discussion, Mr. President, was 
he going to put a meter on fax machines. Were we going to find some 
gadget that we wire to a computer on networking or E-mail throughout 
the country that would somehow monitor whether it was a personal 
message, whether it was urgent or not and, therefore, whether the 
Postal Service was supposed to receive some revenue?
  The point is that the delivery of personal messages or business 
messages that are written on a piece of paper, folded up and put in an 
envelope with a stamp, are probably, in terms of history, only moments 
away from being moot. And what the Postal Service ought to be focusing 
on is how to adapt technology so that the Postal Service is in front of 
this communication curve.
  I was encouraged by statements of the Postmaster General because, 
indeed, he focused on this type of activity. A good part of his remarks 
dealt with the fact that they knew they were facing massive changes in 
the ways in which Americans communicate, one to the other, individual 
to individual, business to business.
  So it was encouraging. You do not have many days like that in this 
town. It was encouraging to see that the legislative branch and this 
semi-autonomous monopoly were able to engage in the activity, work it 
through, and come up with a reasonable answer. And the stunning part of 
it is that it was done in less than a year.
  So I commend the Postmaster General for taking these steps that I 
believe will help the Postal Service and all American businesses and 
citizens in our country.

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