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Senators Susan Collins and Thomas Carper, who are coauthors of the Senate postal reform legislation, have released the following statement reacting to the Postal Service’s last-minute opposition to the bill: We are extremely troubled and disappointed that at the very last minute, the Postal Service is attempting to block action on our bill – the first attempt at modernizing our postal system in more than three decades. While no legislative product is perfect, we believe this bill, which is the product of years of debate and compromise among a number of interested parties, gives the Postal Service the tools necessary to survive and thrive in the 21st Century. We’re also outraged that the Postal Service would mislead Senators about what’s in S.662 in an effort to block it. Nothing in the bill would lead to rate increases. In fact, S.662 includes a strong rate cap that would prevent the Postal Service from raising rates each year by more than the Consumer Price Index.

After more than a year of seeking legislation to update how the post office is run, postal management said Wednesday both the House and Senate bills should be scrapped and the whole process started over. Failure to win approval of provisions opposed by the Bush administration could lead to as mush as a 20% increase in postage rates, postal officials said. “We believe there are critical elements missing from this bill, as well as numerous burdensome provisions that would make it extremely difficult for the Postal Service to function in a modern, competitive environment,” the governing board of the Postal Service said in a letter to Sen. Susan M. Collins who chairs the committee on government affairs. The House reform bill approved last year contains similar provisions. “We’ve worked long and hard with House and Senate staff … to try to get corrections to the legislation and we just have literally reached the end of that rope,” postal senior vice president Tom Day said in a telephone interview. The problem centers on provisions for an escrow account and retirement benefits.

Can you put a cost on bad data? The US Postal Service (USPS) can. The USPS reported that it spent UD1.8 billion dollars processing undeliverable as addressed mail in 2001. The main culprit was incorrect and outdated addresses on business-to-consumer mail. Since this kind of mail accounted for 80% of the mail stream last year, the USPS is working with companies to clean up corporate mailing lists. Their goal is to reduce undeliverable as addressed mail by 50% by 2010, and they hope to achieve this through new USPS technology, education and policy change. Even companies that don’t do a lot of mailing could potentially get help with their data quality initiatives.