With the January 2010 move update requirement enforcement speeding towards us, there are two important steps you need to take to ensure that USPS® does not find your mail out of compliance. Merely showing an approved move update method was used prior to mailing will not prevent penalties from being assessed.
Step 1
Remove records that have a changed address and no new address can be provided. These fall into 3 categories: Moved no new address available, PO Box closed and foreign move. Many programs and update methods require that these records be removed from your mail file manually. If these records are present on a mail piece, they will be identified as moves that were not caught by the move update process when passed through MERLIN® (the system used to evaluate compliance of mail pieces).
Step 2
In general, use the same address information on the mail piece that was used for NCOALink processing. Because mail that is scanned through MERLIN will use all information on the mail piece, the same information must have passed through NCOALink. If for example you do not include a personal name from a business-to-business file for NCOALink processing, but included the personal name on the mail piece, it is possible that they name would have caught additional changes.
While there are other factors that could come into play, these two steps will help your runs through MERLIN.
Josh Evans