USPS Office of Inspector General

Courtesy of Apple

Last August, Pushing the Envelope ran a topic on e-readers — devices designed for portable book reading. Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled the iPad. The iPad offers multiple functionality including the ability to read books, surf the Internet, and use computer applications. Unlike most e-readers, the iPad does not have virtual ink technology, which is intended to mimic paper and make reading more pleasant, but it has one key difference from other widely-used e readers — a color display.

To remain financially viable, the Postal Service must effectively streamline its mail processing and transportation networks and optimize its workforce. Between fiscal years (FYs) 2005 and 2009, the Postal Service made progress in these efforts; however, management was unable to adjust resources quickly enough to fully offset declines in mail volume, resulting in a deteriorating financial condition. In FY 2009, the Postal Service experienced the largest 1-year decline in total mail volume since the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 — a drop of more than 25 billion pieces.

How much does it cost to develop, print, ship, inventory, secure, sell, and cancel a stamp used to mail a letter?  What about the stamps that are never sold?  The Postal Service destroys billions of stamps each year because they are obsolete.  In FY 2008, the Postal Service printed 37 billion stamps, which cost $78 million to print.  In that same year, they destroyed old stamps, some of which were printed more than 10 years ago, that were valued at approximately $2.8 billion.  Those stamps were printed, shipped, counted multiple times in various inventories, and finally shipped back for des

Recently Glassdoor.com announced the winners of the second annual “Employees' Choice Awards” for Best Places to Work.

The Top 50 were selected from more than 37,000 companies reviewed by the nearly 100,000 employees who completed a 20-question survey on Glassdoor.com in 2009. Only companies who received at least 25 votes were included on the list. The survey questions relate to employees' attitudes about:

Those of us helping on the Office of Inspector General blog had so much fun last year we thought we would make the top 10 stories an annual event. We’ve provided the top 10 postal stories for 2009. Tell us about any stories we missed and add whatever comments you think appropriate. In particular, we would like to get your input on the top story, so take a minute and vote in the poll below.

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And now in reverse order . . . our top 10: