ATLANTA — As 11Alive continues its intense coverage of issues with the U.S. Postal Service that affect the delivery of mail to metro Atlanta viewers, we focus next on one postal customer who relies on the mail to keep her office open.
Jasmine Hughes is a lawyer specializing in government misconduct. She knew something was wrong in February, when the USPS Informed Delivery free email service advised her W-2 tax form was on the way.
“It was February when I was looking for my W-2,” Hughes recalled. "It never came, and I've been working since I was 15."
She contacted the IRS and her employer, and they assured her the W-2 was sent. She never got it.
That was just the beginning.
She then saw on her USPS Informed Delivery that a client check was on the way, and she said it never arrived. She also showed 11Alive a bank statement she got that had been ripped open and sent to her in an enclosed USPS "We Care" envelope.
She also never received replacement credit cards that were sent to her.
“I didn’t really look into it as much, until we had significant documents like tax document gone missing, and bank statements and obviously the cards,” she described.
Suspicious that her mail had been tampered with, she lost no time in following up.
“I contacted the USPS Inspector General because, obviously, this is a criminal matter, and I was redirected to a local agency called Consumer Advocacy-- it has an address and an 800 number -- ASK-USPS. Nothing happened,” Hughes recounted. "Nothing."
Hughes is not alone. 11Alive reached out to the head of Public Affairs for the Postal Service in Georgia. We received an answer back that the USPS was not giving interviews, even though our station never asked for an interview. All we wanted was a phone call. We never got one.
11Alive replied in emails numerous times, but no response.
Then, we reached out to the office of Louis DeJoy, the U.S. Postmaster General. We asked him to forward our request to the PR staff. We got no response. So, we sent him a second email and, again, we got no response.
For Hughes, although she never heard directly back from the Inspector General, she did get results.
“Magically, after that, the checks arrived at the very same time and they were the checks that had been missing for a month,” Hughes added.
But, the W-2 and the replacement credit cards are still among the missing.
So, Hughes has now gone another route: she uses a box at the nearby UPS store as the destination for any important documents and client checks.
You can keep track of the mail coming your way from the United States Postal Service, go to www.usps.com and sign up for the free INFORMED DELIVERY service.