The financial impact to the U.S. Postal Service from workers’ compensation fraud cases is so significant, it warrants a good deal of investigative attention. Our special agents – often working with other law enforcement partners – investigate fraud by claimants or providers. The Federal Employees’ Compensation Act provides workers’ compensation benefits to civilian federal employees,…
You get what you pay for with Priority Mail Express, the U.S. Postal Service’s fastest mail product. It’s not cheap, but it comes with a money-back guarantee should USPS fall short of the promised one- or two-day delivery. The nationwide service performance goal for Priority Mail Express is 96.85 percent on time. However, it’s falling…
A picture is worth a thousand words. Or in the case of our blog, it’s worth a couple of hundred words. Pushing the Envelope introduces a new monthly feature in this space – an infographic from a recent audit to highlight the report, rather than a blog narrative. For our inaugural entry, we share an…
U.S. Postal Service delivery points are increasing each year. Package volumes are rising steadily as well. And so are customer expectations. This paradigm tends to lead to an increase in customer complaints, especially when delivery performance doesn’t meet expectations. Given these pressures, we are seeing an increasing risk in the areas of delivery and retail…
Most people know the start to the TV show Law & Order: In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups… If we were teeing up the OIG for an introduction in that vein, it might go like this: The OIG mission is to ensure efficiency, accountability, and…
This sounds like a math problem on a standardized test: If the amount of mail processed in fiscal year (FY) 2018 declined by 5 billion pieces and total number of workers used to process mail declined by 5,000 career employees (with workhours also dropping by 4.3 million), how much did overtime costs decrease? Answer: They…
It was an especially lively six-month period covered by our most recent Semiannual Report to Congress – October 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019. The period included the partial government shutdown in December, and January saw the official appointment of our acting Inspector General to the IG position – only the third IG in our…
More packages and fewer letters to more addresses each year. That’s the daily drill for U.S. Postal Service city carriers and city carrier assistants (CCA), the non-career carriers who make up a growing segment of the workforce. As we’ve noted in past blogs, customers are feeling negative effects of this changing mail mix. Complaints of…
