The United States Postal Service Inspector General won’t release the locations where its auditors found egregious fleet safety violations, citing a rule protecting “trade secrets … which, under good business practice, would not be publicly disclosed.”
The material in question is certainly not a trade secret. In 2012, the Inspector General’s office investigated whether managers at 23 postal service regions were regularly assessing the driving records of its delivery workers, many of whom operate large trucks under enormous pressures to deliver through rain, snow, and gloom of night and against myriad competitors.
The audit found that none of the regions’ managers “completed the required minimum [safety] observations” of drivers. Seven regions did not do any safety observations at all. And only two regions did more than 60 percent of the required safety assessments.
But the report was redacted, so it is impossible to know which regions had the worst records. On May 8, Streetsblog requested an unredacted version so that we could independently assess which Postal Service regions were completely ignoring safety, which were mostly ignoring safety, and which were making at least a decent effort to assess its employees’ driving records.