A address appear Thursday by the Government Accountability Office suggests the postal service's costs "began consistently beyond revenues in budgetary year 2007," which ultimately contributed to a net accident of $56.8 billion over the afterwards eight years.
"USPS is a analytical allotment of the nation's advice and commerce, carrying 154 billion pieces of mail in budgetary year 2015 to about 155 actor supply points, and with added than 620,000 employees," Lori Rectanus, administrator of concrete basement issues at the GAO, said in a account Thursday presented to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Authoritative Affairs. "USPS, however, faces a austere banking bearings and does not accept acceptable revenues to awning its expenses, putting its mission of accouterment prompt, reliable, and able accepted casework to the accessible at risk."
Rectanus said the service's "unsustainable" deficits are acceptable to anticipate it from accouterment able advantage to retirees traveling forward. In fact, the GAO begin that the USPS alone paid $6.7 billion of the $12.6 billion in retiree bloom and alimony payments that were due in budgetary 2015. In endure year's 10-K report, the account cited "declines in mail volume" and "statutory and authoritative restrictions" as affidavit for behind on billions of dollars due to a USPS retiree bloom allowances fund.
Those transaction requirements are accepted to be restructured in budgetary 2017, which begins Oct. 1. But the department's accepted payments will still absolute about $11.3 billion at that time, which is several billion dollars added than it managed to pay in the a lot of contempo budgetary year.
"Moreover, at the end of budgetary year 2015, USPS had about $125 billion in unfunded liabilities and debt, a lot of of which were for retiree bloom and alimony benefits," Rectanus said Thursday. "These unfunded liabilities and debt are a ample and growing banking burden, accretion from 99 percent of USPS revenues in budgetary year 2007 to 182 percent of revenues in budgetary year 2015."
Rectanus concludes that these liabilities "may ultimately abode taxpayers, USPS employees, retirees and their beneficiaries and USPS itself at risk." Sam Abbas, a chief analyst with the GAO, told U.S. News in an email that USPS retirees weren't impacted in the abbreviate appellation but that taxpayers could be on the angle traveling advanced "if Congress wants these allowances to be maintained at accepted levels."
"Alternatively, unfunded allowances could advance to accountability for reductions in allowances or in pay," Abbas says.
That's not to say America's mail carriers should all absolutely panic. USPS saw acquirement access for the third afterwards year in 2015 while abacus about 4,000 career advisers to its payrolls, according to a contempo address the account presented to Congress. And even admitting the Bureau of Labor Statistics in December issued a bleak application angle address for postal workers over the advance of the next decade, suggesting the all-embracing area will arrangement by 165,000 positions, some critics accept taken affair with the government's calculations.
Regardless, it's harder to avoid the service's accepted banking woes. Costs accept exceeded acquirement at the USPS for nine afterwards years. But the service's almost different "pre-funded" bloom account arrangement seems to be at atomic partially at fault.
Back in 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was passed, acute the USPS to accomplish approved payments into a retiree account fund. That fund, in essence, collects money from the USPS now to allotment out in the approaching in the anatomy of retirement and alimony benefits. Abbas says the arrangement protects the USPS "by not saddling it with bills afterwards after advisers accept retired."
Theoretically, the fund's actuality helps assure the postal account in the accident of a approaching abatement by ensuring it has at atomic some banknote set abreast for allowances in the accident of an emergency. But in practice, the arrangement hasn't done abundant for a account whose affairs are already continued thin.
"We accept to pay today for allowances that will not be paid out until some approaching date," the USPS says on its website, acquainted that a acceptable "pay-as-you-go" arrangement would add $5.65 billion to its banknote flows.
Critics of the legislation say the accepted pre-funding system, which about demands preemptive payments in balance of what's currently getting accepted by USPS retirees, has in fact affronted the service's banking situation. The National Association of Letter Carriers said in a absolution endure year that the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act requirements are "the primary could cause of red ink" and accept "drained the postal service's banknote affluence and acquired it to ability its $15 billion borrowing absolute with the U.S. Treasury."
"No added accessible bureau or clandestine action in America is appropriate to yield on such a financially crippling accountability as the pre-funding of approaching retiree bloom benefits," the account said. "Because Congress has failed, as yet, to ameliorate the pre-funding authorization (or to abate its burden), the Postal Account has angry to a bedevilled cost- and service-cutting action that has the abeyant to drive business away."
Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., has alien a bill aimed at patching up what the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act bootless to achieve. Carper, who aswell batten Thursday afore the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Authoritative Affairs, said the new legislation will, a part of added things, "address bloom affliction costs at the postal service" that could advice affluence its retiree bloom burdens.
Should the legislation pass, Carper said the country "can still be optimistic about the approaching of the postal service" in animosity of the contempo bulk of beneath than auspicious authoritative reports.
"Working together, it's important that Congress accommodate some authoritativeness to both postal advisers and customers, and to ensure that taxpayers – forth with all of the budgetary challenges we face as a country – are not saddled with shoring up a declining Postal Service," Carper said in a account Thursday. "We can't allow to be actuality a year or added from now discussing how we can dig ourselves out of yet addition postal crisis."
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