Postal Service Error Delays Delivery of Pension Funds : Retirees: Checks were accidentally dispatched through third-class mail. Prudential’s Woodland Hills office has been inundated with calls.

The checks are in the mail.

Really.

And for 288,000 retirees desperately awaiting disbursements from their pension funds, that’s exactly the problem. The August checks have been in the mail for nearly two weeks now, thanks to a Postal Service error in Scranton, Pa., where pension checks are printed for the Prudential companies, which administer pension funds for unions and companies throughout the United States.

“This is one of the worst crises we’ve had in 30 years,” said Joseph Bonanno, vice president of the Prudential Asset Management Co. of Woodland Hills, which is responsible for 92,000 retired Teamsters.

So many people have called to find out what happened to their monthly payment, he said, that Prudential has assigned 15 people to answer phone complaints full time.

The checks, for more than $100 million all told, got held up because a postal worker accidentally dispatched them to a third-class mail site, Bonanno said. So instead of going first class by air, the checks--including those to retirees from Stanford University, the Auto Club of Southern California, the Times Mirror Co. and a host of other companies--have been traveling by train, truck and even boat to their destinations.

“The first-class containers were inadvertently dispatched to the Philadelphia Bulk Mail Center,” Scranton Postmaster Timothy S. Primerano wrote to Bonanno. From there, he said, they were “incorrectly dispatched via rail car and tractor-trailer to points around the country.”

To make matters worse, checks to pensioners in Hawaii were sent by container ship, said Bonanno. And whereas some mainland pensioners have already begun to receive the payments they expected more than a week ago, retirees in Hawaii probably won’t get paid until next week, he said.

The checks--which under normal circumstances would have arrived July 29--are now so tardy that some retirees have missed rent and loan payments, Bonanno said. Thousands of panicked pensioners have called the office, some of them convinced that their pension fund had collapsed because of troubles in the economy, he said.

“When you become older, this kind of thing can really throw you for a loop,” said a retired Teamster, who would not allow his name to be published for fear of retribution by the union.

Another retired Teamster, who also withheld his name, said he was behind in his rent because of the mix-up.

“I depend on it,” he said of his pension check. “I live from month to month.”

Not one of the four Teamsters pensioners interviewed for this story would allow his name to be used, citing fear of the union. “They’ll hurt me,” said one retiree, who said he doesn’t believe that the checks simply got lost in the mail. “My union represented me for 25 years, but they play rough.”

Bonanno said Prudential plans to send out September checks early, in hopes that retirees will receive them in time to pay the bills they would normally have covered with their August checks.

And Teamsters pensioners who don’t believe the check is really in the mail, he said, can come down to his office and pick up a replacement in person.