USPS Office of Inspector General

Nearly a decade since its rollout, the Flats Sequencing System (FSS) — the football-field sized sorting machines for flats mail — is still falling short of expectations. At its inception, stakeholders were optimistic FSS would improve productivity and reduce the U.S. Postal Service’s costs for handling flats mail.

With about 206,000 vehicles, the U.S. Postal Service’s fleet is one of the largest in the country. It takes a lot of fuel, oil, and maintenance to keep everything running.

To that end, the Postal Service provides a Voyager fleet card for each postal-owned vehicle to pay for fuel, maintenance, and repairs up to $300. In addition, USPS issues fleet specialty cards, which include four types of cards used for very specific purposes. For example, sites can use Z Cards for repairs to vehicles that exceed the $300 limit, and V Cards are used for fueling and maintaining leased vehicles.

What do Millennials like? That’s the 43 million hits question — as in Google hits. And that’s a pretty good indication of just how focused businesses are on this generation and its rising economic power.

More packages and fewer letters is the new normal for the U.S. Postal Service. Now it needs to adapt its delivery operations to this mail mix to protect service. Unfortunately, some customers are already feeling negative effects of this changing mail mix.

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of the Inspector General Act of 1978, but the concept of oversight goes all the way back to the country’s founding when General George Washington adopted a European practice by appointing agents to inspect his army and report their findings.