The U.S. Postal Service Monday urged the Postal Rate Commission to keep its first annual report to Congress on international mail operations from being made public.
The report, due by July 1, was ordered last year by Congress when it passed a law stripping the USPS of its authority to negotiate agreements with foreign postal services and turning that job over to the U.S. State Department.
There is nothing in that law requiring the PRC to “make its report [to Congress] public,” William T. Johnstone, the postal service’s managing counsel, International Law and Ratemaking, said in a letter to the PRC. The law, he added, “merely requires that the Commission transmit [a copy of the report] to each house of Congress.”
The USPS has been trying to keep most of the information about its international operations secret, saying that it is “commercially sensitive” and could be used against it by its competitors, United Parcel Service, Federal Express, and in some cases, certain foreign postal services.
Johnstone went on to say that the USPS would soon be filing documents with the PRC explaining in greater detail “the information it believes should be withheld from its report [to Congress] and why it is commercially sensitive.”
While the PRC has yet to decide whether it will honor the postal service’s secrecy request, Richard A. Barton, the Direct Marketing Association’s senior vice president for Congressional matters, predicted those requests could become “a key issue on postal reform.”
Legislation overhauling the USPS, dividing its products and services into competitive, overseen by a private corporation, and non-competitive, while increasing some of the PRC’s authority over the USPS, is being considered by the House postal subcommittee chaired by Rep. John McHugh (R-NY).
Barton said USPS requests raises the question of “how much secrecy the USPS should have and how much information about its operations should be made public.” Saying that its competitors want all of that information it made public, Barton went on to say that the “question of public disclosure by the USPS should be examined thoroughly before anything can or should be done that might possibly put it at a competitive disadvantage.”
There was no immediate comment from either UPS or Fed Ex about the postal service’s request.
