The Post Office and the Missing $1300 Laptop

A woman in California recently sold a laptop computer of hers on eBay for $1,300, but it never arrived at the buyer’s house. The seller had paid the U.S. Postal Service for insurance and delivery confirmation on the package, so she should be able to get her money back and see who signed for the package. Not quite.

She tells CBS Sacramento’s Kurtis Ming that USPS denied her insurance claim because the package was delivered and signed for as requested, but when she asked to see the proof of signature, the box was blank. So either the recipient had signed in invisible ink or no one had signed at all because the package was lost or stolen in transit.

Nope, insisted USPS, that’s a signature. She appealed her claim twice and no one would admit that there was absolutely no proof that the package had been delivered. In fact, all evidence seemed to show that the package had not arrived.

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Postal Service teeters on the brink

Even as the price of a first-class stamp rose a penny Sunday to 46 cents, the U.S. Postal Service is operating on borrowed time.

“We are currently losing $25 million per day,” Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe warned earlier this month. The agency lost nearly $16 billion in its last fiscal year, and its line of credit with the U.S. Treasury is tapped out.

If lawmakers don’t act, it could run out of money “between six months and a year at most,” said Richard Geddes, associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University.

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Senate struggles to save the Post Office

The Senate struggled Thursday to push forward a bill to restructure the U.S. Postal Service, but still lacked accord on which amendments the senators would be allowed to offer.

“We’re really very, very close to getting something done,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid Thursday afternoon. “Our main issue now is whether there will be a 50-vote hurdle or a 60-vote hurdle,” he said.

The Postal Service is headed for financial collapse and perhaps for a taxpayer bailout. Whether Congress can avert this outcome and save it is the question that the Senate has been debating this week as it considers a bipartisan agency restructuring bill.

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Postal Service on path to be broke by October

WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled House opened the envelope of postal finances on Wednesday and what it pulled out wasn't pretty.

Unless things change, the post office will run out of money by the end of the fiscal year in October, Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe told the House Oversight subcommittee on the postal service.

Donahoe said that as of Sept. 30 his agency will owe the federal government a payment of $5.5 billion to fund medical costs, in advance, for future retirees, and in November it will need to make a $1.3 billion payment for worker's compensation.

"The Postal Service will not have the cash available to make both of these payments. We need legislation this year to address that fact," he said.

If it does come down to crunch time, said Donahoe: "We will deliver the mail." Employees will be paid, as will suppliers, he said. "The thing we will not do is pay the federal government."

Without some important changes to the law the post office "cannot survive as a self-financing entity," Donahoe said.

While the post office has been battered by the recession and the movement of mail to the Internet, it has also cut costs sharply by reducing its workforce by 240,000 people in recent years. Last year it cut costs by $3 billion and expects to reduce spending by another $2 billion this year, Donahoe said.

But, alone among federal agencies, the post office is required to pay about $5.5 billion annually into an account to fund future retiree medical benefits.

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