PUSHING THE ENVELOPE BLOG

There were more than 106,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2021. More than 80,000 of these deaths involved opioids. To help combat the ongoing opioid crisis, our Office of Investigations created four strike force teams during fiscal year 2021. Each team consists of four OIG special agents who collaborate with federal, state, and local law enforcement narcotics task forces to investigate Postal Service employees who misuse their position and collude with drug trafficking

A safe and healthy workforce are part of the lifeblood of any business or organization. The U.S. Postal Service is no stranger to industrial accidents of one kind or another — almost 56,000 in fiscal year 2021 — which is one reason USPS has a safety and health program. Employees are trained on the program to support and sustain the Postal Service’s work environment. Recently, we wanted to assess just how effective the training is as it applies to avoiding or minimizing industrial accidents.

The Postal Service Office of Inspector General works to prevent and detect fraud and abuse in U.S. Postal Service programs. We do that in two ways: Our auditors examine postal programs to make sure there are safeguards that make fraud more difficult, and our agents investigate many types of fraud targeting the Postal Service once they occur. Sometimes a fraud in one area means there is even more to uncover. In 2019, Postal Service managers in the Michigan area reported that people were shippin

Any organization with a computer network is concerned about cybersecurity, and the U.S. Postal Service has one of the world’s largest IT networks. It connects 1.1 million devices and includes 92.5 petabytes of storage. (A petabyte is a million gigabytes.) As cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, keeping networks and data safe from threats is an ever-evolving challenge. One way the OIG helps the Postal Service protect its IT infrastru

Inflation has reached record levels this year, and just about everything from the effects of the pandemic to the war in Ukraine have been cited as contributing factors. For a lot of people, the impacts of inflation are usually quick and direct — the price of that gallon of gas you bought this week compared to last week — but it’s a more complex story when it comes to the U.S. Postal Service. As we report in our latest white paper, inflation affects the Postal Service in different ways. For examp