USPS Office of Inspector General

The pandemic has caused a lot of businesses to struggle with having enough employees available to get the job done, and the Postal Service is no exception. As more and more job vacancies go unfilled, people looking for jobs have more choices about where to work. Which raises the question, how does the Postal Service stack up as an employer?

When your priorities include maintaining the security of the mail, you need to ensure that not just your employees, but also your contractors can be trusted. After all, the Postal Service engages thousands of contractors to help its workforce move the mail in various ways. One of which is handling mail at its Surface Transfer Centers (STC).

For any business, customer service is important. It improves the brand image, keeps customers loyal, and provides insights into the customer experience. In the past, customer service operations for a major corporation would involve thousands of service agents to handle calls — from routine problems to more complex ones. Technology has changed customer service, allowing automated systems to handle routine inquiries 24 hours a day without requiring an agent.

A quarter of a century. Twenty-five years. It’s a long time, no matter how you say it. And that’s how long it’s been since we were created. That’s right, on September 30, 1996, President Clinton signed legislation that established us — the U. S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General — as an independent entity reporting directly to the Postal Service Governors. Prior to this, postal oversight was done by the Postal Inspection Service, which reported to the Postmaster General.

In a world increasingly driven by digitized information, the ability to harness data for business objectives becomes almost a requirement to keep operations moving efficiently. That’s a big reason why the U.S. Postal Service started deploying the Informed Visibility (IV) system six years ago. By centralizing information from numerous USPS data systems and a variety of mail processing equipment, IV provides Postal Service management with near-real-time visibility into the movement of mail through the postal network.