Pretend you’re an auditor at the OIG, and your team has started an audit to review an operational or financial area of the U.S. Postal Service, which generally takes 6-9 months. Suddenly, you come across an urgent issue, something that the Postal Service needs to deal with right away. It can’t wait months until the main audit report is issued.  What do you do?

The OIG has a specific type of report to deal with this, the management alert. These reports are designed to communicate urgent information to Postal Service management, allowing management to take corrective action before the main audit is completed. Management alerts typically take around 60 days to complete, though they undergo the same level of rigorous review as our full audits. As with audit reports, the Postal Service is able to agree or disagree with our findings and recommendations. 

We’ve issued a number of management alerts recently. Our upcoming audit on counterfeit postage has prompted three. In October 2025, a management alert identified problems with counterfeit postage that could lead to $400 million in losses.  A second alert in February 2026 found deficiencies in the Enterprise Payment Account system that could lead to fraudulent activity, with a past loss of more than $500 million and a potential future loss of $1.3 billion. The most recent alert, issued this month, focused on an emerging counterfeit label trend that resulted in a revenue loss of $46.3 million over four months.  Postal Service management agreed with all our recommendations in the three alerts.

Sometimes, a management alert can be generated from an observation during an unrelated audit. Last year, while our auditors worked on a report evaluating the Postal Service’s Regional Transfer Hubs (RTH) initiative, they saw mail security issues at the Denver RTH that warranted notifying the Postal Service immediately. The resulting management alert identified problems with mail security by the outside contractors running the facility, including missing tags identifying service levels, damaged mail, and low security over Registered Mail. Postal Management agreed with our finding as well as our recommendation to address these issues at the Denver RTH.

Management alerts give us the ability to inform the Postal Service about serious problems right away. But what happens if you know of a serious problem or crime being committed within the Postal Service? Please report it to our Hotline so we can look into it. 

PostScript

If you’re curious about what our auditors are currently working on, check out our Upcoming Audits page. You can view the descriptions of the audits and there is even an option for you to share any information that you may have as it pertains to a particular topic during the fieldwork phase of the audit. One of our recent posts is an audit where we are examining the financial and service impacts of changes to the Postal Service’s workforce composition.