Raleigh’s mail processing center plagued by problems and delays, audit finds
Jammed mail sorting machines, low employee availability and poor tracking led to more than 1.4 billion pieces of mail being considered delayed at the U.S. Postal Service’s Raleigh processing and distribution center over a 15-month period in 2020 and 2021, according to a new audit of the facility.
The amount of mail that was actually delayed in getting to customers was considerably lower, but a physical count over a five-day period in June 2021 discovered an estimated 92,500 pieces of mail were delayed. That’s about 8% of the mail that was marked as delayed during the same time period.
The report, released this month by the Postal Service’s inspector general’s office, focused on the center on Floretta Place which serves all of Eastern North Carolina. Mail for anyone with a ZIP code that begins with 275, 276, 277, 279, 283, 284 and 285 comes through the facility. It is not uncommon for distribution centers to serve such a wide area.
The report includes five recommendations for improving operations at the center. All were accepted by the center’s management.
The coronavirus-era audit, which covered Jan. 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021, found 7,843 late-arriving containers, 1.44 billion pieces of delayed mail and 112,302 containers of mail delayed on their way out. The audit said not all of those were actually delayed or late, but some were marked that way due to improper tracking.
Marketing mail frequently jammed mail processing systems, resulting in machines being shut down to clear the jams and other mail bypassing the tracking system.
“When mail processing operations were bypassed and scans did not occur, the mail was reported as delayed inventory,” the audit said.
The center failed to meet its goals for processing Priority Mail, though the audit was unable to determine how much of an impact it had on those getting the mail. At certain points, the center was meeting its timeliness standard 51% of the time — well below its 95% goal.
“We just don’t know how much of it was delayed to the customer,” said Adam Bieda, the director of the plant evaluation team in the IG’s office.
Those figures were “outside the scope of our audit,” Bieda said in a telephone interview this month.
Concerns about postal service
The Postal Service, its leadership and mail delays were a much-discussed part of the 2020 election. Greensboro businessman Louis DeJoy, a big Republican fundraiser, was appointed postmaster general in May 2020 by the USPS board, which was controlled by President Donald Trump appointees. DeJoy took over in June 2020.
The coronavirus pandemic led to a dramatic surge in mail-in voting during the election. Trump frequently complained about potential fraud among mail-in ballots.
Nearly 1 million voters in North Carolina voted by mail in the 2020 presidential election. About 70% of them voted for Joe Biden, though Trump won the state due to his strong performance among voters casting ballots on Election Day and during in-person early voting.
DeJoy implemented significant changes after taking over, designed to cut costs and increase efficiency. An IG report in October 2020 found the “initiatives, combined with the ongoing employee availability challenges resulting from the pandemic, have negatively impacted the quality and timeliness of mail delivery nationally.”
Though Dejoy delayed some changes until after the election — as political pressure mounted and states threatened lawsuits — some moves affected service. At the Charlotte processing facility, seven sorting machines were removed.
In March, DeJoy announced a 10-year reorganization plan, which would reduce hours at some post offices.
Employee availability
Like the national report, the audit of the Raleigh center highlighted low employee availability as one reason for the problems. Employee availability averaged 76% during the 15-month period, far below the goal of 95%. Management attributed it to employees using excessive leave, reporting to work late and frequently using leave without pay.
“As a result there were not enough employees to sort the mail and ensure that operational clearance times were met,” the audit states.
COVID-19 was the main issue, Bieda said, and it is not limited to Raleigh.
“A lot of the reports we’ve done recently, employee availability has been an issue,” he said.
During the 15-month audit period, the Raleigh center had the ninth-highest volume of delayed dispatch containers (112,302) in the country. The Mid Carolina facility in Charlotte ranked eighth (114,494).
A delayed dispatch container is described as a container that has not received a departure scan more than 15 minutes after the last dispatch of the day is loaded. Employees should scan a container before it is loaded. But Raleigh employees “were not performing the container load scans consistently before dispatching the mail to the next facility,” auditors wrote.
Some of the containers were not actually delayed and were dispatched on time.
Raleigh center management said “the decrease in load scanning performance was due to a key manager being on extended leave .... and employees losing focus on consistently performing the load scans,” according to the audit.
This story was originally published August 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Raleigh’s mail processing center plagued by problems and delays, audit finds."