The Office of Inspector General is tasked with ensuring efficiency, accountability, and integrity in the U.S. Postal Service. We also have the distinct mission of helping to maintain confidence in the mail and postal system, as well as to improve the Postal Service's bottom line. We use audits and investigations to help protect the integrity of the Postal Service. Our Semiannual Report to Congress presents a snapshot of the work we did to fulfill our mission for the six-month period ending March 31, 2025. Our dynamic report format provides readers with easy access to facts and information, as well as succinct summaries of the work by area. Links are provided to the full reports featured in this report, as well as to the appendices.

A Message from the Inspector General

The United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG) provides oversight of a massive, complex organization that plays a vital role in the country as a facilitator of both communications and commerce. Our critical function is finding and stopping fraud, waste, and abuse within the Postal Service and its regulator. Our work identifies inefficiencies and provides actionable solutions to postal leadership. Over the last five years alone, our investigations have returned over $2.6 billion to the federal government — including over $400 million to USPS — and prevented future payments related to fraudulent activity of over $1.2 billion.

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Over time, fraud related to the Postal Service has become more complex. Criminal organizations have developed elaborate fraud schemes against the Postal Service and the federal government. There are significant efforts to recruit postal employees into the schemes — people who otherwise may have never thought to enter a life of crime. In response, we have developed sophisticated data analytics and AI tools that help our investigators identify anomalies where fraud may be occurring. This allows us to stop both the postal employees committing the crime and the external criminals who recruited them. 

Our hotline receives hundreds of thousands of complaints annually and we are leaders in the IG community in making arrests and stopping crime, despite our current and limited resources. Our analytics and AI tools identify far more potential investigations than we can currently address given the size and scope of the Postal Service. While we are constantly finding new ways to use these tools to become more efficient and make the most of our resources, additional funding is needed to help us root out and stop further fraud, waste, and abuse.

Our work has measurable impact: Over the six-month period ending March 31, 2025, we returned over $75.7 million to the federal government, including over $13.4 million to the Postal Service. The results of our investigations and audits had a total monetary impact of over $412.5 million. And our audits helped the Postal Service and Postal Regulatory Commission address both localized and systemic issues, with the agencies collectively accepting 83 percent of our recommendations.

I am proud of the work we have done to fight fraud and return money not only to the Postal Service but also back to the federal government. I look forward to the challenges ahead.

Tammy L. Hull
Inspector General, United States Postal Service