USPS Office of Inspector General

The U.S. Postal Service has one of the largest federal property portfolios in government. And with good reason. Its facilities support the delivery of mail to over 157 million delivery points.

One of USPS’s major responsibilities is to ensure these facilities are as safe as they can be, to protect the mail, the employees who work there, and the customers who visit every day. To meet these goals, the Postal Service relies on its managers and the Postal Inspection Service.

The holidays might be over but the package returns season is in high gear. It kicked off in mid-December, shortly after the first wave of holiday deliveries, and is expected to run through most of this month.

It’s that time of year again. Our annual list of the top 10 stories from the postal and logistics world. And who doesn’t love a list?

As always, we had no shortage of stories. In fact, the hardest part every year is narrowing the list down to 10. (Now we appreciate how difficult it is for the Football Bowl Series to rank college football programs for the annual four-team playoff!)

The OIG staff sifted through the postal-related news of 2017 and put together a top 10 list of stories. In reverse order of importance, here they are:

Pushing the Envelope wishes our readers a joyful holiday season and a prosperous New Year. We will take a break this week, but we encourage you to read over the past year’s blogs and let us know what you think about any of the wide range of topics we blogged on in 2017.

On January 1, we will post our annual list of the Top 10 Postal Stories of the Year – one of our most popular blogs of the year.

As package volumes climb, so too has the U.S. Postal Service’s investments in sorting systems. Since 2015, it has deployed 33 Small Package Sorting System (SPSS) machines costing over $141 million. It intended to invest another $23 million to have seven more SPSS machines operational during the current holiday season.