Investigative Case Highlights

As you’ll soon read in our upcoming Fall Semiannual Report to Congress, our OIG Hotline received over 90,000 complaints in the second half of this fiscal year. One of them led to a contract fraud investigation that returned a sizeable amount of money to the Postal Service.

A construction contract company decided to do just that… and was caught. When contracted for work with the Postal Service, the company that is hired for the project is allowed to subcontract the work. When doing so, a subcontractor can only mark the cost up by 10 percent. However, this contract construction company went a little further. A USPS OIG criminal investigator uncovered overinflated...

Sometimes, fraud schemes involving Postal Service contractors aren’t open and shut cases. And sometimes, they come from unexpected places and require extensive collaboration with other law enforcement agencies to bring those perpetrating crimes to justice.

We recently closed a claimant fraud case involving a postal employee that stretched from 2009 to 2021. In early 2007, this employee had filed a workers’ compensation claim alleging she sprained her ankle while on the job. The Department of Labor (DOL) approved her claim and began issuing FECA benefit payments two months later. Our agents investigated the case as early as 2009, after receiving a...