
Keeping the Postal Service Looking Its Best
Post offices and delivery units are the Postal Service’s front door to the public. People visit them to buy stamps, drop off mail, or pick up a package. They’re also the workplace for postmasters, clerks, and carriers. That’s why it’s so important they are clean, safe, and in good condition.
The OIG regularly audits property conditions at retail and delivery units. On June 2, we released what we call a capping report. The capping report summarizes our findings from 16 property condition audits conducted in fiscal years 2020 and 2021. These reviews uncovered hundreds of issues at 46 facilities:
- Maintenance and appearance problems including unclean lobbies with dirty or damaged fixtures and walls needing paint or repair;
- Health and safety problems such as plumbing and electrical issues and tripping hazards; and
- Security issues such as unlocked vehicles, insecure doors, and inoperable security cameras.
As part of the capping report, we took a second look at some of the facilities where we found the most egregious problems as well as two new facilities to see if the Postal Service was doing better at keeping its facilities in good condition.
Unfortunately, while the Postal Service fixed problems found in the initial visits, management didn’t ensure that facilities continued to be well maintained. Our auditors identified new issues at all of the revisited facilities as well as at the two new facilities. The same sorts of problems kept cropping up again.
The OIG found the problems continued to occur because the Postal Service does not have a standardized process to assess whether employees at retail and delivery units are maintaining facility standards, and we recommended the Postal Service implement one. The Postal Service agreed with the recommendation.
How do you think the Postal Service can take better care of its facilities? Could your local post office use a good cleaning or some maintenance?
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I hope to see some new life to this beautiful building. Thank you!
I would recommend that the post office look into a pay for performance contract for it's sites that have a weekly checklist of all cleaning / maintenance functions to be performed. This would then need to be signed off by either a supervisor or the postmaster of the site and submitted to a central repository for record keeping.
Further there needs to be a work-order page that all employees can submit a work order, work orders for broken items should be auto-approved up to a certain dollar threshold. After that work orders would need to be reviewed by management and concurrence or non-concurrence must be followed with a strong justification.
All work order items would then go to district to monitor for completion status.
Finally district representatives should be making an effort to walk all the post offices in their AOR once a month. There should be a comprehensive checklist that should closely align to the cleaning/maintenance checklist and if there are discrepancies then the person signing off on that checklist would be engaged to figure out why and, if necessary, perform corrective counseling.
Finally there should be a USPS wide database of post-offices and their last rennovation date. That should be used for planning/budgeting purposes to establish a normal rennovation cycle (IE: once every 5 years)
Management says that it's "clean dirt".