PUSHING THE ENVELOPE BLOG

Do you ever wonder what the OIG’s auditors are working on? Or do you ever read one of our audits and think, “I wish the auditors had known what I know”? Well, we have an answer for you. Check out our list of Upcoming Audit Work. Except for quick response field audits, we post most of our upcoming audit projects to the list. (You can find the list by using the three parallel lines symbol or “hamburger” in the upper-left corner of our website. Click it to open the full menu and then loo

If we had a penny for every time someone confused our Office of Inspector General (OIG) with our parent agency, the U.S. Postal Service, we’d be… well, let’s just say Jan Brady would understand! However, with six organizations bearing the term “postal” in their name, it’s hard to avoid confusion about who does what. Let’s take a Venn-type look at all these entities.

We want to wish all workers a very happy Labor Day, but especially the employees of the Postal Service! The Postal Service is a huge organization with a workforce of more than 635,000 employees as of the end of last year. The vast majority of postal employees — 98 percent — work in field positions around the country.

A delivery unit is usually the last postal facility in the delivery process. That’s where clerks and carriers get the mail ready so it can be loaded onto each mail carrier’s vehicle (or bike or pushcart). In the old days, delivery units often sorted parcels to each route by hand. This is time-consuming when there are a lot of parcels, and in 2014, the Postal Service deployed automated sorters for small packages at some delivery units. More sophisticated parcel sorters were introduced in 2021.

Never underestimate your role in safeguarding America’s trust in the U.S. Postal Service. While we get ideas for new work from various sources, including Congressional requests and mainstream media reporting, the most prominent avenue for reporting fraud, waste, and abuse within USPS is the OIG Hotline. In the first half of fiscal year 2023, we received 88,691 Hotline contacts alone.