Sometimes it can be confusing to keep track of who does what in this postal world. The U.S. Postal Service has a wide range of stakeholders, including a few entities with oversight responsibilities. We, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), are one of those entities.
If you’ve rummaged around our website lately, you may have noticed a new tab on our home page entitled Audit Asks. “What is Audit Asks?” you might ask. It’s where you can read about some of our upcoming audits in their early stages and respond to questions that can help us develop more complete and useful audit reports.
Audit Asks is actually an update of our audit project pages, initially launched about 6 years ago to get feedback from our readers. With the new Audit Asks format, we have added some eye-catching graphics and changed our writing style to prompt more feedback.
The year 2014 was certainly historic on the postal and logistics front. Alibaba entered the U.S. market with a bang, setting a record with the largest ever U.S. initial public offering. For the first time ever, non-mail revenues exceeded mail revenues for postal administrations around the world. Shippers braced for the full effect of dimensional weight pricing. And the U.S. Postal Service added its name to the growing list of agencies and companies to suffer a data breach.
The world may be getting smaller, but cities are getting bigger. More than 80 percent of the country’s population lives in urban areas, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
Fortunately, cities are getting smarter too. Using technology, data, and analytics, cities can implement “smart”...
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Mail collection boxes are practically as American as apple pie. They also seem to be disappearing as quickly as mom’s homemade apple pie.
Nationally, the number of collection boxes declined by more than 12,000 in the past 5 years. Some customers have complained the U.S. Postal Service...
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Neither the Internet nor smartphones can hold advertising mail down. Even with digital advertising growing at a rapid pace over the past 20 years, advertising mail has kept its same share of the market — around 10 to 12 percent.
What’s advertising mail’s secret?
Well, besides the...
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We are conducting an audit to verify the accuracy of clerk and mail handler costs attributed to products and services. The Postal Service categorizes all costs as either attributable costs, which are directly or indirectly related to products, or institutional costs, which are not related to...
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The U.S. Postal Service uses highway contracts routes (HCRs) to transport mail between plants, post offices, or other designated points where mail is received or dispatched. HCRs are contracts with independent drivers to travel specified routes. Postal Service policy states HCRs must be surveyed...
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The Mobile Delivery Device (MDD) is the latest handheld device to be used by Postal Service carriers to track package activities in real time. The MDDs access a wireless network for real-time tracking, thereby creating package visibility that is essential for the Postal Service to maintain and...
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