Dear Sir,

After bouncing around for 14 years under five government ministries, the Bermuda General Post Office now falls under the Minister of the Cabinet Office. In 2020, the Government introduced an innovative GPO business plan to help close the unhealthy gap between revenues and expenditures, and this included a controversial e-commerce initiative to help increase its revenues.

The initiative was called MyBermudaPost — it would offer the people another shipping option when shopping online overseas and it would facilitate fast and cost-efficient shipping of packages to the island with an added bonus of home delivery. Now there’s a service which sounds very appealing, given that we are a speck in the Atlantic Ocean with limited choices from our struggling island retailers.

The introduction of MyBermudaPost was met with some backlash by local courier companies, with claims that the Government should not be competing with the economic engine of the private sector and that the Government had failed to abide by its own contract procurement rules when it did not offer the private sector an opportunity to bid on this service contract, using an overseas vendor instead.

The Government was eventually sued by one such courier, which was successful and which cost the taxpayer $30,000 in reimbursement of legal fees. The dust settled, nothing else changed and MyBermudaPost has been in operation using an overseas contractor since November 2021.

Let’s look at some GPO revenue and expenditure numbers around that time for context.

By March 2020, before the launch of MyBermudaPost, the GPO expenditures were at $9.9 million and traditional postal service revenues amounted to $3.4 million. This is the “unhealthy gap”, which the Government hoped to narrow. Wayne Furbert, then the Minister of the Cabinet Office made this statement:

“Mr Speaker, the start of the Bermuda Post Office change initiative is focused on e-commerce service conveniences. This is where the post office can increase its potential revenues starting in 2021. With continued investment in the BPO’s technology, marketing and resource infrastructure to compete for consumers, we will improve the financial sustainability of the post. The business plan provides a model for additional potential revenues in additional e-commerce services to start at a conservative $800,000.00 in new revenues for 2021 to $1.7 million in additional revenues by 2024."

Then, in February 2023, we heard an update on the MyBermudaPost service from the present Minister of the Cabinet Office, Vance Campbell, as follows:

“The Bermuda Post Office will continue to enhance its MyBermudaPost product, which has already proven to be hugely successful for customers. This service has earned approximately $270,000 since its inception in November 2021 and we project revenue of $300,000 for 2023-24.”

For a much broader history of GPO fiscal data, here is a snapshot of two decades’ worth of its revenues/expenditure statistics taken from the audited financial statements of the Consolidated Fund. My sample years are: 2001, 2010, 2017, 2020, 2021 respectively (as at March 31) and the numbers are rounded. Note: 2001 is the earliest year available online.

Looking at the revenue/expense numbers for the two-year period 2021-2023 — when MyBermudaPost is actually operational and presumably making money — we see no real positive change in total GPO revenues. Obviously, the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 have some bearing on these statistics, but overall we can assume that the original e-commerce revenue estimates were overstated.

While we are being told that MyBermudaPost is very popular with the public, the revenue numbers are far below initial government projections. In fact, for the present fiscal year ending March 2024, the government budget book projects an estimated reduction in overall GPO revenues from $3.3 million to $3.1 million and the GPO is getting almost $9.3 million for its expense budget. One has to wonder whether the Government’s business plan for the post office makes sense from an economic perspective when you consider these numbers, but maybe time will tell.

I made an interesting observation during my research of these statistics. Included in all the GPO expense numbers are obviously employee salaries/wages, which, unsurprisingly, make up 82 per cent of the total expenditures for 2022-23. However, the rather glaring discovery was that there exists a GPO employee position of “mail handler”, which has an annual salary grade starting at $99,519.83 maxing out at $106,779.37. Why does this stand out to me? It is because 90 per cent of our public school teachers are being paid far less than this position of a government postman. I’m not aware of the qualifications for working as a mail handler, but this salary disparity between the two job descriptions is certainly a slap in the face to just about every teacher working in our Civil Service.

There are differences of opinion over what the mission of government is — ie, what services and functions the Government should actually deliver. Yet don’t we all think that whatever the Government does, it should be efficient, effective and deliver on its mission in the least costly way possible?

The GPO numbers are there for you taxpayers to decide. I will say that I don’t think the Government should be competing with the private sector for non-essential — eg, MyBermudaPost — services of this nature.

BEVERLEY CONNELL

Pembroke