Postal Service cuts losses to $676M
The U.S. Postal Service lost $676 million in the last fiscal year, about half of what officials had projected to lose.
Postal officials had budgeted a loss of $1.35 billion.
Postmaster General John Potter attributed the improved performance to a reduced work force. About 23,000 career employees were cut through attrition. The financial information was released at a board of governors meeting Tuesday.
“Today we have about the same number of employees we had in 1995, even though we’re delivering 22 billion more pieces of mail,” Potter said.
In addition to the cost-cutting, postal rates went up in June boosting revenues.
And last month the Postal Service reported that a new financial review found it had been overpaying into the Civil Service Retirement System. That reduced liability promoted Potter to say another rate increase could be delayed until 2006.
During the year the postal service also reduced its debt by $200 million. Officials had projected increasing the debt by $1.6 billion.
The postal service increased its revenue for the year by $819 million to $66.7 billion. Officials attributed the increase to the postal rate hike and early implementation of the new rates. Expenses came in at $67.4 billion, which was $185 million below the previous year.
Volume declined by 4.6 billion and the delivery network grew by 1.7 million addresses.
“We must stay the course begun this past year with our transformation plan,” said board chairman Robert Rider. “We must continue to build on the successes we’ve achieved so far.”
Earlier estimates for large losses were made after the terrorist attacks and anthrax-by-mail contamination threatened to cost the agency millions of dollars.
Congress and President Bush have provided about $750 million to assist the post office in recovering from the anthrax and terrorist attacks, that money has been kept in a separate account for those purposes and is not included in the overall accounting for postal operations.
The post office is still in the process of cleaning up anthrax-contaminated facilities in Washington and New Jersey.
The post office receives a small federal payment for handling mail for the blind and voters overseas but has not gotten a taxpayer subsidy for operations since 1982.
