Can I sue USPS for not getting a letter to a place on time?

Alright, say I had 10 days to get a letter to the Office of Workers’ Comp. I decide to send it certified mail and am told it will take no longer tan 3 days.

I pay for certified mail and two weeks goes by and no certified mail receipt and Workers Comp still doesn’t have the VERY IMPORTANT letters that I sent. I check it online with the tracking number today and the letter just got there on Thursday the 12th of June and yet it was sent on May 30th 2008. In turn, this causes my case to be postponed because according to the workers comp people, I didn’t send in my paperwork on time.

But it was the post office’s fault. Can something be done about this? Can I sue the post office? Also, if it is possible, have other people done this and were their outcomes favorable?

I went to usps.gov to see what guarantees they offered but I couldn’t find anything. It talks about Average Deliver Time but that’s not the same as a guarantee.

I would suggest you register a complaint with the USPS and see if that gets you anywhere. Unfortunately I don’t think you can do much at this point. Hopefully I’m wrong.

Does the USPS guarantee their delivery times? UPS does, but all you’ll get back is the shipping cost.

Certified mail doesn’t provide any guarantee of delivery times. If you wanted expedited delivery, you should have sent it by Priority Mail.

However, even Priority Mail provides no guarantee of on-time delivery:

You’re out of luck.

Even if there were such a guarantee, you can bet there is a huge disclaimer for so-called “consequential damages”

If your receipt has a date on it, send a copy to WC and ask that it be placed in your file, showing that the delay was due to the USPS. That’s what I did with mine. Good luck on your case, btw - and keep copies of everything!

I was sorely informed that FedEx’s guarantee of delivery means that they will give you your postage back if it is not delivered in a timely fashion. Yeah, they gave me back my $15.75 after the SBA proposal that I spent a month working on didn’t get delivered on time.

Yeah, you definitely should’ve sent it priority. 12 days is an exceedingly long period of time to deliver a letter, but I’ve been told that certified mail actually slows down the delivery process.

They don’t have a fax machine or you couldn’t scan it and email it to them?

USPS’ fastest service is Express Mail, which is guaranteed.

I’m not optimistic about your odds against the post office, but like **Pixilated ** says, get your ducks in a row and document when you sent stuff in to WC. In a similar situation, I have seen organized, persistent clients get exceptions made for deadlines. I hope it works out for you.

…but the guarantee just gives you your postage back if they don’t make it.

I’ve sent things Express before, and though it worked most of the time, it did not work all of the time.

No delivery service could afford to have an open-ended guarantee of timely delivery. Suppose someone lost a hundred million dollars because it took a week to deliver a letter when it was supposed to take two days. There must be a limit to their liability, and generally they set the limit at the cost of the service.

Many businesses face similar situations. For example, most photo finishers limit their liability in cases of loss or damage to the cost of the film. They wouldn’t be able to stay in business if they guaranteed the value of the pictures themselves.

I understand about the guarantees and whatnot. They may have cost me my whole case today. A case that has been in the works and active for 5 years now. I sent this damn information back to them two weeks early to be safe and yet the fucking post office screws up. So ya can’t sue them, huh?

To all who wished me luck, I appreciate it. Thanks.

And yeah, I know how these guys work. In fact, this is OWCP, FEDERAL Workers Comp to top things off. They are like dealing with a bunch of phantoms. The only way to talk to your case worker is to leave them a message on their audix system, then they never call you back. Ever.

When you get letters from them, the only way they will accept it back is through the mail, then you have to mail it to Kentucky to their mail facility. There they scan all mail into their systems and it goes to the appropriate files. High tech stuff, you know… lol

If the modern world has taught us anything, it’s that you can sue anybody over anything.

You didn’t ask if you could win.

There’s no reason that a business couldn’t offer such a guarantee; you’d just have to pay for it.

For example, the USPS offers insurance on things getting lost or destroyed in the mail, up to a certain amount (and you pay by the amount). Currently, the insurance you get on a package can only be up to the actual value of the contents, but there’s no reason that they couldn’t change that rule. Basically, instead of refunding you the actual amounts in case of loss, they’d refund a pre-determined bounty if they fail to meet whatever deadline they’ve claimed. As long as they have good data about their delivery statistics, they should be able to find an underwriter who’d take that risk.

The pizza places that give you free pizza if it’s late could give you 100 free pizzas for each late one. They’d just have to charge more for it, and no one seems to care enough. Given the potential downside of missing a deadline, I’m surprised that no delivery company offers such insurance.

But doesn’t that sort of beg the OP’s question?

The issue is not whether the delivery is guaranteed, but what the remedy is when delivery fails to happen within the guaranteed time, and whether you have legal recourse through the court system.

Anyone can offer a guarantee, but a guarantee is effectively worthless if the available remedies don’t provide compensation that approaches the victim’s actual loss. Offering a refund of postage if the package doesn’t make it on time is completely useless to a person who might have missed out on thousands of dollars’ worth of business or (in the OP’s case) speedy resolution of a Workers’ Compensation case.

It’s like a professional photo lab that fucks up the 1,500 shots that a photographer took at a wedding, and offers to reimburse him for the film. The remedy fails utterly to compensate for the actual loss.

I agree. In the hypothetical you propose, the photographer could sue and so could his or her client. The photographer could claim compensatory damages equal to time lost, loss of income from sales, etc. Both could claim punitive damages.

In the case of the OP, though, it’s not clear what the damages are. Instead, the best thing to do is to send evidence that the USPS screwed up, and hope for the best.

And next time, send via Express Mail and notify the recipient that he’s mailed it Express Mail (perhaps even with witnesses) and follow up the day after it’s supposed to be delivered and chase after the USPS if it isn’t delivered that day.

Guarantees mean nothing when it comes to deliveries, anyway. If the airplane that’s carrying your letter crashes, then what? The best you can do is find out what’s going on.

Where’s the return on that investment, though? Are enough new customers going to spring for this service to (a) recoup the overhead costs of getting it off the ground and (b) cover the costs of the fraudulent claims made?

This is a good discussion of postal service liablity: http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?A=1770&Q=281804 (postal service only liable to the extent it has agreed to be).

And see Dolan v. USPS: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/05pdf/04-848.pdf (“Congress intended to retain immunity, as a general rule, only for injuries arising, directly or consequentially, because mail either fails to arrive at all or arrives late, in damaged condition, or at the wrong address,” but Service remains liable for other negligence in course of delivery, such as negligently leaving the package on a porch)

and: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/politics/politicsspecial1/23scotus.html?_r=1&oref=login