Identify and Recover Dormant Permit Funds

  1. Do not assume you are getting refunds for closed accounts.
  2. If you have a permit account without activity for two years, the USPS® will send one letter to the person who originally took out the permit to come into the local Post Office within 30 days to request the funds or to pay the annual fee.
  3. If this does not happen, the funds will be transferred to a different general ledger account at the USPS® and it will be considered income to the Post Office for that year.
  4. You have the right to get the money back if you can prove you had a permit at that Post Office, but it is up to the client to initiate this request.
  5. The USPS® will never send another notification about these funds or make them available in any public database for you to search.
We had the USPS® Office of the Inspector General do a research study on this and it turns out there are hundreds of millions of dollars that have been taken due to the USPS® not publishing these funds as is required for every other type of lost funds throughout the US.  The key point is that we check the balances on all of your accounts and set up a process to make sure the funds are returned on closed permits.

Postal Advocate will help recover dormant and lost postage including:

Identifying dormant account balances throughout the United States
Validating that the specific account should be refunded
Requesting the refunds following USPS® procedures
Validating with the client that funds have been received
Storing the data in the Postal Advocate enterpriseAdvocate© web dashboard to have full visibility of all postage spends in a standardized format
Monitoring accounts for the future to find future opportunities

As the only mail audit and recovery firm in the US and Canada, we manage a portfolio of over 174,000 pieces of mailing and shipping eqipment for the largest US companies.

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