Transportation is central to mail delivery, so it is no surprise that the companies who move the mail dominate the list of the Top 150 U.S. Postal Service Suppliers in Fiscal Year 2019. Seven of the Top 10 companies are involved in transportation. Federal Express tops the list, as it has since 2002, with just
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What the Lance Armstrong settlement agreement tells us about the Government’s case
While the settlement of the False Claims Act case against Lance Armstrong has generated a press release, a quick online search didn’t produce a copy of the actual agreement. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request and the next day the Department of Justice provided me a copy of the Lance Armstrong settlement agreement. Thank you, Team DOJ! Below is my take on that agreement and what it tells us about the case.
The settlement amount
The settlement agreement provides that Lance Armstrong will pay $5 million to the Government and $1.65 million to the relator Floyd Landis. To put this in context, the Postal Service had paid about $40 million to sponsor Team Postal. Trebling that amount, and throwing in civil penalties and investigative costs, bumps up potential damages to well over $100 million. The settlement amount was thus less than 7 cents on the dollar.
Damages was always the Government’s weakness – because there weren’t any. This should have been apparent at the outset from the contemporaneous USPS reports on how much publicity and new revenue the Team Postal sponsorship had generated. These reports were poppycock, of course, but they still posed insurmountable problems for the Government’s case.
Top 10 reasons why Postal Service contracting differs from other federal agencies
Not your typical federal agency, the U.S. Postal Service is an “independent establishment” of the executive branch of the United States government. (39 U.S.C. § 201.) As a result, many federal procurement rules do not apply to the Postal Service. Here are the major differences between USPS’s purchasing policies and those of other…