Report from MTAC for Nonprofits

May 27, 2015

By Dennis Kaylor, Alliance Mailers Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) Representative and Postal Affairs Manager at Our Sunday Visitor, dkaylor@osv.com

Nonprofit Validation in eDoc

With the introduction of the United States Postal Service (USPS) Full Service requirements a few years ago came the promise for a new method of verifying a mail owners’ eligibility for nonprofit postage rates. Currently not much has been implemented, especially for mail owners presenting their own mailing, or for mail service providers presenting a mailing with a single mail owner or multiple mail owners in a mailing.

The USPS will still accept mailings with a single or multiple mail owners by inputting a single postage permit, provided the permit is owned by a qualified nonprofit eligible mailer, or a ghost number may be used to link a Nonprofit Authorization (NPA) number to the paying postage permit number. For mailings with multiple nonprofits in the same mailing, only a single nonprofit mail owner must be identified in the current USPS acceptance procedures along with a hard copy or electronic file displaying all the other nonprofit mailer owners in the mailing.   This exception practice has been in place for many years for multiple nonprofits mail owners in a single mailing and is currently allowed to be used to qualify for Full Service requirements

At the National Postal Forum held in Anaheim, California last week, we spoke with Pritha Mehra, USPS Vice President, Mail Entry and Payment Technology, seeking a time line for when the exception would be removed and all nonprofit mail owners would be required to be identified in eDoc by a Customer Registration Identification (CRID), Mailers Identification (MID), postage permit, or ghost number.  Under Full Service, without the current exception, NPA numbers will no longer be a means of identifying nonprofit eligibility, and while the Postal Service does not have current plans to eliminate the ghost number, they are anticipating it will go away when CRIDs, MIDs, and postage payment permits become required means of validation.  At the time of our conversation Ms. Mehra would not speculate on a time frame; however, PostalOne has been ready for the new acceptance guidelines since early this year.

Validating your Nonprofit Eligibility

The Business Customer Gateway (BCG) has been enhanced to provide numerous methods of determining a customer’s NPA as well as validating whether a mail owner is eligible for nonprofit rates.  The BCG now has a tool where you can enter a CRID or MID and the BCG will return a simple “YES” or “NO” answer if the customer is nonprofit eligible, and a host of other tools to validate CRIDs, MIDs, and customer information.  These are found under the Manage Account tab on the BCG.

We have learned there is a tremendous number of customers who have multiple CRID numbers as well as NPA numbers.  The Pricing and Classification Service Center in New York has been working to remove any extra NPA numbers a mail owner might have.  In their attempt to purge the NPA files, some previously valid NPA numbers may no longer be valid in PostalOne.  Mail owners may show an NPA in BCG, however the number may be expired for non-use or other reasons. We strongly urge nonprofit mail owners to go to the BCG and verify your CRID, MID, and NPA numbers, and of greater importance is to assure they are all linked.  Basically all customer data is linked through a CRID, so using the CRID, be certain your NPA and MID are associated with the same CRID.

(c) 2015 Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers