The Postal Service is a very big place with more than 30,000 delivery units and post offices, hundreds of processing plants, and various other operations to help move the mail across the country and support employees that do this work. In a typical year, we issue numerous recommendations to the Postal Service in our audit reports and white papers; in FY 2023 the total was 328 recommendations in 134 reports.

But what are recommendations for? Does the Postal Service have to respond to them? How do they impact the Postal Service’s work?

In our reports, OIG audit teams make recommendations to the Postal Service to help improve programs and operations. While the OIG does not have the authority to force changes on the Postal Service, USPS must respond to a report’s recommendations. If Postal Service management agrees with a recommendation, they provide a date to implement corrective action. As actions are implemented, they provide supporting documentation for the audit teams to review and if we agree the actions were sufficient, OIG agrees to close the recommendation. However, if they disagree with a recommendation, we work with them on a resolution that addresses the issues we identified. Of the 328 recommendations we made in FY 2023, the Postal Service agreed with 93 percent of them in its initial response.

Unresolved recommendations are kept “open” and reported to Congress as such, until we receive sufficient documentation to show that the Postal Service has addressed the issues we identified. You can find up-to-date information on our Open Audit Recommendations page. To see the status of all the recommendations from a specific report, check out the report’s landing page (see this example).

While all recommendations are tangible, certain ones can have an associated monetary impact.  Monetary impact falls into three categories:

• Questioned Costs – The recommendation is designed to prevent expenditures that may violate a law or rule, have inadequate documentation, or may be considered unreasonable.
• Revenue Impact – There are opportunities for the Postal Service to grow revenue by implementing the OIG’s recommendation.
• Funds Put to Better Use – Money would be used more effectively if management implemented OIG's recommendation.

What does this ultimately mean for our oversight over the Postal Service?  Looking back at FY 2023, 21 reports had monetary impact, with $39 million applied to Funds Put to Better Use, $195 million in Revenue Impact, and over $1.25 billion in Questioned Costs.

Recommendations are not just something our OIG does. Other Offices of Inspectors General also issue and track recommendations for their agencies. For more information on open recommendations from across the federal government, check out the Oversight.gov Open Recommendations page.

Postscript

Today is also Tax Day, the deadline for most Americans to file their federal and state taxes.  While we aren’t going to wish you a Happy Tax Day (that would be wrong), the OIG would like to take the opportunity to remind you that sales of postage including stamps, and not taxpayer dollars, are generally used to fund the Postal Service. You can learn about Postal Service stamp prices in our new study, The Price of a Stamp: An International Comparison, either as a white paper or a digital story.