Keeping it confidential: both during and after employment

Postal employees are obligated to keep Postal Service information confidential and protect postal intellectual property – during their employment and after leaving the Postal Service.

Maintaining confidentiality is critical. Violating it could have a negative effect on the organization’s profitability and, ultimately, its success.

Confidential information includes new solutions, inventions, trade secrets, business plans, information from business partners and customers, and employee, financial and research data.

Intellectual property consists of confidential information, particularly ideas created by employees in the course of business. It also includes patents, trademarks and copyrights.

This valuable postal property must be protected so the Postal Service can benefit from its full value.

Intellectual property belongs to the Postal Service and can only be used for its benefit, not for the personal benefit of its employees. Federal ethics regulations prohibit postal employees from using nonpublic information to further their own private interest, or the interests of someone else, and from using their positions for their own, or another’s gain.

Even after an employee leaves the Postal Service, confidential information obtained, or any intellectual property developed, during postal employment can’t be shared with other individuals or companies.

Source: USPS