USPS Reports 2nd Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Results – Net Loss For the Quarter Totaled $2.5 Billion

  • Continued progress on the Delivering for America plan
  • Mail volume declines, operational inflation and elevated retirement expenses continue to negatively impact financial results
  • Service continues to improve with 98 percent of the nation’s population receiving their mail and packages in three days or less

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Postal Service today announced its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2023 (Jan. 1, 2023 – Mar. 31, 2023). On a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis net loss for the quarter totaled $2.5 billion, an increase in net loss of $1.8 billion, compared to a net loss of $639 million for the same quarter last year. On a non-GAAP basis, adjusted loss was $498 million, compared to adjusted income of $427 million for the same quarter last year.

Results under GAAP include costs outside of management’s control of $2.0 billion for the quarter, an increase of more than $900 million, compared to the costs outside of management’s control of $1.1 billion for the same quarter last year. Costs outside of management’s control include retiree health benefits expense eliminated by the Postal Service Reform Act (PSRA) which were therefore not incurred this quarter, as well as other costs that increased this quarter when compared to the same quarter last year like retiree benefits expense for the amortization of underfunded Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) and Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS) plans, and workers’ compensation expenses caused by actuarial revaluation and discount rate changes. The Postal Service reports its adjusted results excluding these costs.

“The Postal Service is making rapid progress with our 10-year transformation and modernization plan, which has already produced strong service performance and efficiency improvements and is creating a much more capable and effective operational model for the nation,” said Postmaster General and CEO Louis DeJoy. “We continue to focus on achieving break-even financial results for the 10-year period, although inflationary and economic conditions, as well as administrative hurdles, have proven difficult. The increase in the pace of change now required to achieve our financial goals will continue to be balanced with providing service performance throughout the nation.”

Total operating revenue was $19.3 billion for the quarter, a decrease of $484 million, or 2.4 percent, compared to the same quarter last year. Click HERE to read more.

Retiring Mid-Year? Consider Front-Loading Your TSP

Do your plans include retirement this year? If so – good for you! Many people choose to retire at the end of the year. December 31, 2023 will be a popular day for FERS employees to retire. Of course, once you are eligible to retire, you can pick any day you choose. I retired on February 28th and my wife retired on November 27th; we were two of many who chose to retire on days other than December 31st.

If you’re one of those who is leaving at the end of the year and have been maxing out your TSP contributions for the last several years, just keep on doing what you’ve been doing, and you’ll have maxed out again by the time you retire. However, if you choose to retire in the middle of the year, you may want to consider “front-loading” your TSP.

In 2023 you can contribute $22,500 to the TSP, plus another $7,500 if you are 50 or over. That’s $30,000 that most retirees can contribute.

If you are retiring in the middle of the year (and if you can afford it), you can accelerate your TSP contributions so that you hit the maximum by the date that you leave. Let’s say you are planning on retiring at the end of June, and let’s assume that you will leave at the end of the 13th pay period of the year. If you contributed $2,308 per pay period, you would reach the full $30,000 at the end of the 13th pay period.

$2,308 per pay period is an amount that is out of the reach of many federal employees nearing retirement. Nonetheless, you can still accelerate your payments (say, by increasing your contributions from 10% to 15% of salary) and end up with a larger amount in your TSP when you leave. It’s never too late to put more money in your Thrift Savings Plan.

Did you know that when you take a loan from your TSP account, the transaction will include a proportional amount from each balance (traditional and Roth)?

 

Citation: FEDweek Published: May 8, 2023

The (Not So Pretty) FERS Origins Story

It’s May 1986. The Cosby Show and Family Ties are the top-rated TV shows. Top Gun starring Tom Cruise and Cobra starring Sylvester Stallone are boffo box office. Addicted to Love by Robert Palmer and Kiss by Prince top the pop music charts.

In federal offices, while the Macintosh computer has been on the market for two years, the technology focus is on the new fax machines that can also scan and print on plain paper. Besides, for those relatively few employees who need a computer at work, there’s the next generation of the IBM PC featuring slots for two 5 ¼ inch floppy disks, each capable of storing an astonishing 160 kilobytes per side!

And in Washington, the Republican Reagan administration and the Democrats controlling Congress are casually making decisions affecting the financial futures of millions of future federal employees and their family members.

That’s when the Federal Employees Retirement System was enacted into law. Up until then, FERS existed only in theory. The Social Security reforms of several years earlier had ordered that all federal employees hired after 1983 be put under that system as a way of getting more money paid into it. That was done on the premise that those employees would fall under a new system to include Social Security, a 401(k)-type program to be called the Thrift Savings Plan, and civil service annuity benefits less generous than those of the only federal retirement program existing at the time, the Civil Service Retirement System. Filling out the details had been left for later.

Among the details emerging as the concept was fleshed out were several provisions making FERS less valuable to employees than CSRS. The main one, of course, was that the basic benefits formula yields civil service annuities worth only about half of a CSRS annuity for employees with the same time of service and high-3 salary level. That was justified as an offset to the benefits that FERS employees would receive from Social Security–compared with the CSRS system that doesn’t include Social Security—plus the value of employer contributions into the TSP for FERS employees.

Fair enough. But that wasn’t all. For example, there were several provisions whose origins never were made clear, such as denying FERS employees the kind of credit toward years of service that CSRS employees received for unused sick leave in their retirement calculation. Another was denying FERS employees the right to make payments to recapture prior service time if they had withdrawn their retirement contributions at a break in service.

Both of those eventually were repealed. Another involved cost of living adjustments to those annuities. Where CSRS retirees receive full COLAs as indicated by an inflation measure regardless of their age at retirement, FERS generally pays no COLA before age 62, and even then, there is a reduction the indicated figure is above 2 percent. Specifically, the FERS COLA is capped at 2 percent if the figure is between 2 and 3 percent, and is 1 percentage lower than an indicated figure of 3 percent or more.

In some years that doesn’t matter but in others the partial reduction hits and in yet others—as in 2022 and 2023—the full reduction applies. That has led to calls to repeal that provision, as well, with bills having been reintroduced in each Congress for a number of years.

The origin of that provision, too, seemed to have been lost to history. However, in a recent report examining the repeal proposal, the Congressional Research Service unearthed a valuable find, in the form of statements from civil service leaders at the time.

For example, it found that then-Rep. Michael Barnes, D-Md., had said that the FERS COLA provisions might be interpreted as a “capitulation on the commitment we’ve maintained to federal retirees to protect their benefits from inflation.”

But he insisted that “In the context of the overall retirement plan, an indexed Social Security program, coupled with interest earning, tax-sheltered savings [in the TSP], can provide annuity growth more than capable to keeping place with rising costs.”

Sen. Thomas Eagleton, D-Mo., said this:

“The federal unions, who exhibited statesmanship throughout the entire process, receded on some highly important points, such as a cost equivalent to the civil service retirement system and a guaranteed full COLA for retirees. The unions fully support today’s conference report. The administration, which had hoped for a lower over-all cost than the bill achieved, an increase in the federal retirement age, and an accrual formula based on high-5 salary, rather than high-3, also swallowed hard and it, too, fully supports the report.”

So there you have it, FERS employees and retirees. Your retirement inflation protection was traded away like a backup running back in a fantasy football league.

One last point. The law creating FERS also included a provision allowing employees under CSRS to switch to it voluntarily. In that window and one that followed several years later, only low single-digit percentages did so.

Eagleton, though, said at the time the bill was moving through Congress that “my reading from staffers and colleagues is they can’t wait to join the new system.”

Looking back, that produces a bigger laugh than does a rerun of The Cosby Show or Family Ties.

Citation: FedWeek Published: 

Moving in Retirement? Make Sure Your Benefits Move with You

If you move in retirement, as many retirees do, you’ll want to make sure your federal employment-based benefits move with you.

To report a change in address after retirement, write to Office of Personnel Management, Retirement Operations Center, P.O. Box 45, Boyers, PA 16017-0045, call (888) 767-6738, online www.servicesonline.opm.gov. Use the same points of contact to arrange to have your annuity sent to a different financial institution, if you are changing accounts because of the move.

To change your address under the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, contact your carrier directly and follow its procedures. If you are enrolled in a plan that serves a limited geographic area, such as a health maintenance organization, you will be covered for emergency care. But unless your HMO has a “reciprocity” agreement with a plan in your new area that allows you to get routine care, you must travel back to the HMO’s coverage area for such care, or change plans. To change plans, contact your retirement system. OPM’s Web page at www.opm.gov/insure/index.html contains a list of plans from which you can choose and find out how to get brochures for those plans.

Moving out of a regional plan’s service area also qualifies for changing plans under the Federal Dental and Vision Insurance Program. To change your address and/or plan, contact www.benefeds.com, phone (877) 888-3337.

Since the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program has just one national carrier, moving does not affect enrollment. Notify the carrier of your new address by calling (800) 582-3337 or writing to Long Term Care Partners, P.O. Box 797, Greenland, NH 03840-9803.

Similarly, since the Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance program has just one national carrier, moving does not affect FEGLI enrollment. Notify the carrier of your new address at OFEGLI, P.O. Box 6512, Utica, N.Y., 13504-6512, phone (800) 633-4542, fax (315) 792-6603.

To let the Thrift Savings Plan know a new address, use the My Account feature at www.tsp.gov.

If you have state income tax withheld and you move to a different state, you must contact the state you move away from to stop the tax withholding. If the state into which you move participates in the OPM tax withholding plan, contact its tax office to arrange for new withholding. OPM cannot make any change without notice from your state tax office.

Citation: Published: -FedWeek