Charles Mapa, President

Dear Leaguers,

For the first time in FY 2008, stations/branches and other operations started to have their unit goals measured to their individual finance number level. This was a dramatic change from all of the prior years of NPA. It was also dramatic as NAPS, NAPUS and the League were unaware that this change was implemented.

Management failed to consult with the management organizations on this change that drastically alters the evaluations of operations that formerly were grouped together for unit measurement under a “lead” finance number.

In a Consultative Meeting between NAPS and the Postal Service on December 8, 2008, NAPS brought this issue forward as a discussion item. Tom Henry, representing PES for the USPS advised us that shortly after his arrival in the department in early (March) 2008 that he “found” this change in the system and did some research to determine how it occurred. In his research he stated that this is what the officers wanted to do, but he did not relate to NAPS that the organization was ever consulted on this change.

Both NAPUS and the League also had no prior information relative to this change and their members in the field were also surprised when the evaluations came out to the unit finance number level instead of the lead finance number.

The internal research that Tom Henry conducted at USPS HQ was concluded in April 2008. It was determined by the Postal Service that this was the way that unit goals would be measured. The management associations were not consulted about this change and only became aware of the changes when our members were in the process of completing their end-of-year assessments.

The management associations have two problems with this change. First, we were not consulted and second, it is just a bad idea. If we had been consulted on this change, we would have never agreed to it.

We would have pointed out that resources in the field, especially in a Post Office/Station environment, are shared between offices in order to meet operational needs. This change to measurement down to the finance number level “rewards” offices that needed help and were assisted by lower cost employees, and punishes offices that gave up lower cost employees to other offices and used higher cost overtime to meet operational objectives.

Operations managers in the field were even unaware of this change during the year and they managed their operations as they have done in prior years, moving resources from operation (office) to operation as the needs arose.

On January 6, 2009, at a meeting at NAPS HQ, Bill Jones advised NAPS that the practice of measuring offices at their finance number would continue and that the remedy to ensure that office that shared resources completed work hour transfers in TACS to re-allocate the work hours to the proper finance number when resources are shared.

The management associations believe that this is a bad idea, for managers and supervisors to arbitrarily transfer hours from their finance number and operations to other finance numbers and operations. The practice of transferring hours is not always accurate, is time consuming and would be unnecessary if the Postal Service simply reverted back to the former system.