Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Postal Service undercharged countries including China, India and Canada by millions of dollars because of errors in processing mail at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, auditors said.

The Postal Service may recover $2.2 million of the $3.4 million that it said it is owed by the postal agencies of the other countries, a report by the service's inspector general said. The remainder stemmed from computer, billing and employee errors made in 2006, too long ago to be recovered under law.

``The Postal Service expects to recover the full amount listed some time next year,'' Postal Service spokesman Yvonne Yoerger said today. ``The funds we can't recover is money lost to the Postal Service that we are due.''

The Postal Service's JFK Airport facility made billing errors on 78 percent of the overseas mail received from Oct. 1, 2006, to May 31, 2007, according to a Jan. 24 report displayed on the agency's Web site last week.

About 39 percent of the mail was from China. The JFK Airport facility processes international mail from more than 190 countries, Yoerger said.

The Postal Service is a government agency required by law to set its rates to cover costs. It had $75 billion in revenue last year, and ran a deficit of about $5 billion, Yoerger said.

$12.5 Million Catch

The JFK Airport location, the largest of five Postal Service facilities in the U.S. that process international mail, handles 60 percent of all overseas express mail entering the U.S. If auditors hadn't caught the errors, the facility would have undercharged foreign agencies $12.5 million over two years, the report said.

One problem is that if express mail is scanned through JFK Airport stations on different dates, the system can miscount, the audit said. In one example cited by auditors, a batch of seven letters came in late one night and was immediately processed through the first station. When it reached another station the next day, the batch was counted as a single piece of mail, the report said.

The report followed up on audits of four Postal Service international-mail facilities between 2004 and 2006. The audits found the facilities operating ``in an antiquated, inefficient, and manual work environment,'' the latest report said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Neil Roland in Washington at nroland@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: February 25, 2008 15:47 EST