Upcoming Audit Work

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service uses the expense purchase card to pay for day-to-day operational needs that cannot be satisfied through priority sources such as in-house excess material or from national or area contracts and ordering agreements. Postal Inspection Service employees with purchase card local buying authority must follow policies and procedures and obtain proper approval to ensure purchases are for official Postal Service business. Our objective is to assess the Postal Inspection Service’s expense purchase card use. 

As part of its Delivering for America plan, the Postal Service is redesigning its network of nearly 19,000 delivery units to reduce inefficient operations and costs. The Postal Service has identified key markets where it can aggregate several delivery units into fewer, larger Sorting and Delivery Centers (S&DCs) that are centrally located. As of November 2024, the Postal Service rolled out 83 S&DCs that encompassed 9,497 routes and expects to develop 36 more in 2025 that would encompass 3,313 routes. Our objective is to determine if the Postal Service evaluated and created routes accurately at the S&DCs. If not, estimate the cost impacts.

The In-office Cost System (IOCS) is the primary probability sampling system used to attribute and distribute labor costs of clerks, mail handlers, city carriers, and supervisors to those employees’ activities, particularly those activities relating to handling mail of all classes and rate categories and to providing extra services. IOCS provides a mechanism for attributing certain labor costs to activities performed within the Postal Service’s network. Our objective is to assess select internal controls over the Postal Service’s IOCS sampling processes. The scope of our audit is from fiscal year (FY) 2020 through FY 2024. The estimated report release date is March 2025.

Priority Mail Express (PME) is the Postal Service’s fastest mail service, offering 1-day or 2-day delivery by 6 p.m., with a money-back guarantee. However, with the implementation of Local Transportation Optimization (LTO) in October 2023, most optimized post offices within the 16 LTO regions can no longer offer overnight PME. To support this initiative, the Postal Service announced in October 2024, changes to PME service, adding an extra delivery day in some cases. This audit will evaluate the Postal Service’s initial implementation of the new PME service.

As part of their Delivering for America plan, the Postal Service plans to invest $40 billion to network modernization, based around Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDCs), Local Processing Centers (LPCs), and Sorting and Distribution Centers (SDCs). Overall, the Postal Service will establish 60 RPDCs to consolidate mail processing operations and create fewer points in the processing and transportation networks. Each RPDC will process mail and packages originating in its service area and have one or more LPCs associated with it. This audit will focus on the network transformation and consolidation of operations at the Boise, Idaho RPDC.