Photo: RNZ/Leah Tebbutt
New rules around PO box numbers are causing headaches for businesses, with a new policy at NZ Post meaning mail is no longer redirected by local posties.
One Dunedin company said its regularly missing infringement notices which could land them in court, and a national Shakespeare festival has reported a dip in entries after more than 50 information packs were returned to sender.
Earlier this year, posties were instructed by NZ Post that letters addressed to a company's physical address when a PO box is available should be returned to sender, with workers no longer allowed to look up the box number and replace it on the envelope.
Then, RNZ reported in February posties were disobeying the order, saying it took no extra time or effort to write the correct box number on the envelope to get mail where it needed to go.
Steve Divers, risk and compliance manager at Dynes Transport, said his company had been missing infringement notices which alerted the company to things like broken lights or cracked windscreens, and gave them a set amount of time to remedy the problem.
Divers said these notices would be addressed to the company's physical premises, which in their case was in an area not eligible for mail delivery, but the local postie would usually write the PO box on the envelope.
"Then all of a sudden, we stopped getting them," he said. "We thought we must be doing okay at the moment, and then we started to get notice of court fines coming through."
Divers then discovered the police infringement bureau was required to post infringement notices to the address listed on the Companies Register, which must be a physical address.
This was confirmed to RNZ by police and MBIE.
Now, with posties told not to redirect the mail to the PO box at their end, letters from the police were bouncing back.
Luckily, Divers said the company had been engaging with the local senior sergeant about another matter, and he was able to hand-deliver some of the notices.
That other matter was an accident allegedly caused by an NZ Post truck, caught on dashcam veering over the centre line near Northland, which Divers said caused the truck and trailer to be written off and put the driver in hospital.
NZ Post confirmed the customer was not eligible for standard mail delivery, but did have a PO box, and posties would no longer be offering this "free readdressing service".
It said the process for sending out infringement notices was a matter for the police.
It acknowledged the change might be inconvenient for some customers, but said it had been "working with impacted mail receivers to ensure that they have sufficient time to communicate a valid delivery address".
In Wellington, a national Shakespeare competition has seen fewer entries than normal and lost hundreds of dollars on postage, after more than 50 information packs were returned.
Dawn Sanders, chief executive of the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand, said she had taken the addresses for hundreds of schools from the Ministry of Education website, and was surprised to find them back on her doorstep.
They were marked as undeliverable because the physical address had been used instead of the PO box.
Information packs were posted to schools in bulk, allowing the principals to distribute the relevant papers to different teachers.
The cost had been considerable - between $3.60 and $4.90 for an envelope.
"This year, out of 774 we mailed out, about 50 have been returned to sender," Sanders said.
"That means that all those schools are missing out on the festival, and we're missing out on their participation."
Sanders said they would look to digitally sharing the information for next year, but with this year's competition due to start at the end of March, and substantial preparation time needed for students to rehearse and make costumes, it was now too late for many to enter this year.
"The entries are a bit slower this year," Sanders said.
Entries were at 172, down from 200 last year, and although it was impossible to say for sure, she guessed it was influenced by schools not receiving information packs.
"Some of [the regulars] have still rung us, but there's others, and new potential ones, that don't know about it and it will be too late, and it does actually dampen the vibe," she said.
NZ Post said the changes were in response to New Zealanders choosing to communicate more online.
It said it would eventually begin streaming mail into the parcel delivery network, reducing two urban delivery networks to one, reducing costs to a commercially sustainable level.