PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

If you hear the phrase “USPS OIG Investigation,” your first thought might be a postal employee being arrested for mail theft. While our special agents do conduct a lot of internal mail theft investigations — over 730 cases closed during the first six months of FY 2026 — the scope of our Office of Investigations’ work is much broader.

Big news: we’re expanding beyond the written page and into your headphones. Our brand-new Pushing the Envelope podcast is here, exploring the stories behind our audits, investigations, and insights through real conversations with the people who worked on them. In our first episode, we interview research analyst Teresa Kline, one of the leading forces behind our latest white paper, The Role and...

The OIG issues more than 100 audit reports every year, but have you ever wondered what goes into an audit? In March, we released our audit report examining the new relief supervisor position and its impact on the Postal Service workforce. Let’s follow along the audit process with Dana and Scott, two of our auditors, both with 18 years of experience, who are located in the OIG’s Warrendale, PA...

The financial losses for the Postal Service continue to grow, totaling nearly $118 billion since FY 2006. USPS temporarily paused contributing to its employees’ pension plan to conserve cash. Unfortunately, there’s no single solution that will right the Postal Service’s fiscal ship. It will take a combination of tough decisions to make a bottom-line difference, likely impacting most, if not all...

In this blog, we look at our efforts across the agency in the fight against mail theft. Our Office of Investigations is on the front lines executing 730 investigations and 237 convictions in the first half of the fiscal year. But our Office of Audit plays an important role too. Learn about our past audits on mail theft, and the efforts the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service have made...

As you get ready for summer, looking for that good beach read, we have something for you! We just released our latest Semiannual Report to Congress (SARC). It’s a summary of our work to improve the integrity, accountability, and efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service and its regulator, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), for the first half of the 2026 fiscal year.

The Postal Service has more than 624,000 employees. Most are career employees with full federal benefits, but more than 93,000 are pre‑career employees, who tend to change jobs more readily as they decide whether working at USPS is right for them. Not surprisingly, this means having a good hiring process is important to ensure postal vacancies are filled on time and new employees are prepared to...

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?

Tracking essential Postal Service financial information over time often means hunting through dozens of reports and other documents. We have a new tool to help. The Postal Service publishes lots of important data reports on its own Financials page and in filings to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). One key report is the Postal Service’s Form 10-K, which provides annual financial data.