In a 288-page order issued May 27, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) discusses changes to service performance and reporting by the Postal Service.

A proposed rule published by the PRC in the September 30 Federal Register seeks to enhance the information provided by the Postal Service’s periodic reports about service performance.

Background

In an earlier advance notice of proposed rulemaking, published in the May 2 Federal Register, the PRC proposed revisions to existing annual and periodic service performance reporting requirements for the Postal Service’s market-dominant products, consistent with the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022.

That statute directs the Postal Service to develop and maintain a publicly available online ‘dashboard’ that provides weekly service performance data for Market Dominant products.

Requirements

Much of the commission’s proposal consists of revisions to those parts of the Code of Federal Regulations that codify the requirements it proposes. However, the PRC also provided a summary of its proposals:

  1. The Commission proposes a provision requiring the Postal Service to report average actual "delivery days" for each Market Dominant product.
  2. The Commission proposes a provision requiring the Postal Service to report point impact data for the top 10 root causes of on-time performance failures for each Market Dominant product that did not meet its service performance goals.
  3. The proposal includes requirements for reporting data related to its Site-Specific Operating Plans (SSOPs) by Region and Division, both quarterly and annually.
  4. The Commission proposes that the Postal Service report the performance of each nonpostal product in the Annual Compliance Review (ACR).
  5. The Postal Service must report mail excluded from measurement, disaggregated by reason(s) for exclusion, and mail volumes measured and unmeasured by Full Service Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb).
  6. The Commission proposes requirements for the Postal Service’s online dashboard of service performance data for each Market Dominant product.
  7. The Commission proposes to formalize requirements for the existing auditing program and to consolidate these existing requirements.

Whether the proposed rule reflects dissatisfaction with the Postal Service’s current reporting requirements isn’t clear, but the agency’s weekly press releases touting its service stand in contrast to the more granular data provided to the PRC quarterly.

Observers conclude that resistance to more detailed reporting may not be genuinely related to the burden of developing the data, but rather an institutional unwillingness to disclose the data. If the commission’s rulemaking succeeds in overcoming the Postal Service’s resistance, ratepayers may have a much better view of actual USPS service performance as a result.

The full text of the PRC’s Federal Register notice can be found at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2022-05-02/pdf/2022-09327.pdf. Comments on the proposed rule are due by October 31.