Return to Sender? Centralized Processing to Save A Million

Return one undelivered bankruptcy notice and court staff can manually process the piece. Return over 700,000 mail pieces to the bankruptcy courts annually and postage can cost the Judiciary roughly $1.25 million per year in addition to staff processing time. That’s what the courts will save when, effective October 15, 2012, the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) begins accepting, processing and securely disposing of returned mail.

All bankruptcy courts use the BNC for notice production and distribution services and last year the BNC transmitted more than 160 million notices to bankruptcy filers and creditors.

Currently, returned mail is handled by the BNC contractor, by the court, and by the debtor’s attorney. While the debtor’s attorney will continue to receive mail as the designated return addressee, the remainder of the returned mail will be consolidated and processed by the BNC.  

For the bulk of mail returned by the post office, the BNC will scan a unique bar code on the returned mail to log and identify the envelope contents, and generate an email notification of returned mail to the debtor’s attorney—all without opening the envelope.