The Oregonian: The U.S. Postal Service is warning its customers in Oregon and across the nation that their mail may no longer be postmarked the day they drop it in a mailbox or at their local post office.
The Postal Service says customers who are sending time-sensitive items that need a postmark that same day — including mail-in ballots sent on Election Day and tax returns that must be sent by April 15 to avoid penalties — should bring them to their post office’s retail counter and ask an employee to postmark them.
Many institutions that formerly relied on postmarks to establish when documents were mailed say the change, which the Postal Service codified Dec. 24, is significant. It can have repercussions for members of the public if they don’t take heed — from ballots not being counted, to the IRS or the state Department of Revenue assessing penalties for tax returns that arrive late, to retailers refusing to accept returned mailed-in merchandise because it wasn’t postmarked within the company’s required return window.
The Postal Service’s website isn’t naming affected post offices. Neither did USPS spokesperson Janella Herron when The Oregonian/OregonLive asked Monday whether the postmark delays are affecting customers in Oregon’s population centers, such as Portland, Salem, Eugene or Bend.
But it appears the delays will be most common outside the Portland area because Herron said there’s only one processing center in Oregon that postmarks letters — and that’s in Portland. That means mail must travel hundreds of miles in some cases before it’s postmarked.
The change is part of cost-cutting measures that the Postal Service, which has existed in one form or another for the past 250 years, is undergoing to survive a massive reduction over the past few decades in the volume of letters and packages mailed.