The Postal Service spent half again as much on overtime in fiscal 2018 than it had planned, largely because of problems related to using a new work scheduling tool, an IG audit has found.
A report said that in that year—when the amount of mail and the numbers of workers and work hours spent in processing it all declined by several percent—USPS planned for a similar decrease in overtime costs to about $732 million, but actually incurred nearly $1.1 billion. That includes standard time and a half overtime and so-called “penalty” overtime applying in certain situations at which employees are paid at twice their standard rate.
In hour terms, the Postal Service planned for about 18.5 million regular overtime hours and 767,000 penalty overtime hours but actually used 26.7 million (44 percent over plan) and 1.7 million (126 percent over plan), respectively.
“This occurred, in part, due to implementation of an employee scheduling tool at the beginning of FY 2018, which we discovered needed some finetuning,” it said. In particular, it used as a baseline a week that “was not representative of mail processing operations for all facilities and, as a result, it did not always schedule the right people, in the right place, at the right time.”
“The Postal Service is currently rolling out an updated version of the scheduling tool that should better set the standards for employee schedules and complement levels,” it said, adding that “opportunities also exist to address management oversight to prevent unauthorized overtime, reduce grievances, and increase employee availability.”