Electronic Mail Improvement Reporting-Workshare Mail Quality
Background
The Electronic Mail Improvement Reporting (eMIR) System is a nationwide web-based system U.S. Postal Service employees use to report business mail quality issues and recurring problems, including issues detected after mail is accepted. Improperly prepared mail could increase costs and impact efficiency by requiring additional processing or causing delays in delivery. eMIR was designed to save costs by assigning Postal Service representatives to contact mailers to discuss the reported issues, their root causes, and corrective action the mailer will take.
The resolution process generally involves preventing current issues from occurring in future mailings. Resolutions are recorded in eMIR and reports from the application are available to Postal Service staff and mailers using the Enterprise Data Warehouse.
Our objective was to determine whether Eastern Area personnel are fully using eMIR to report mail quality issues and recover costs associated with irregularities in workshare mail preparation.
What the OIG Found
Eastern Area personnel did not use eMIR effectively to report and resolve mail preparation issues. Eastern Area managers stated that the current system is not “user friendly” because it takes too long to gather and enter data into eMIR. They estimated that about 10 percent of mail preparation issues get reported in eMIR. All ten mail service providers we spoke to recalled emails or telephone calls from the Postal Service to address mail quality issues, but nine could not recall being contacted as a result of an eMIR report.
In addition, the application does not always direct issues to the appropriate staff for resolution or consistently provide feedback to employees on the resolution of reported issues. Nationally, about 57.3 percent of the issues reported in eMIR were listed as unresolved. For about 87.4 percent of unresolved issues, eMIR could not identify where to send the issue for resolution. Furthermore, reporting employees did not always understand mail preparation requirements, therefore, they sometimes omitted relevant data. The Postal Service could incur increased mail processing costs if mail quality issues are not adequately reported and resolved.
For the period May 2014 through April 2015, there were 44,306 eMIR issues reported nationwide. eMIR was used less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the time to assess additional postage. The primary reason was because the application was not designed to recover costs. Additionally, the information reported in eMIR was often inadequate to calculate the impact.
The Postal Service has an opportunity to use eMIR to support the Seamless Acceptance process for business mail verification by identifying preparation issues and making postage adjustments for mail not processed with automated equipment. But this can only occur if the application gathers the proper details.
What the OIG Recommended
We recommended the vice president, Mail Entry and Payment Technology, evaluate the effectiveness and continued use of eMIR to include updating electronic eMIR forms, establishing an eMIR feedback process that provides specific resolution details to employees who initiate reports, evaluating the use of eMIR in conjunction with Seamless Acceptance to recover costs of improperly prepared mail, and developing and implementing a training program to promote the use of eMIR by mail processing and delivery operations personnel.