U.S. Postal Service OIG

As consumers and small businesses increasingly use computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices to buy and sell goods, there is a growing demand for flexible ways to buy services to ship these goods. The Postal Service lags behind its primary competitors in offering technology-savvy customers...

As the U.S. Postal Service continues to address its difficult financial situation, some have argued that overall efficiency would improve if the Postal Service were to focus exclusively on the first and last mile (collection and delivery). While the introduction of workshare discounts has led to...

Throughout its history, the U.S. Postal Service has been part of the nation’s vital infrastructure, facilitating economic activity, improving quality of life, and benefiting wider society in a variety of ways. But the Postal Service is also mandated to operate like a business, which can pose...

Increasingly, companies large and small are moving toward flexible workforce policies, which allow employees, among other things, to adjust their work schedules to their personal lives as much as possible. In general, the strategic value of such policies is that they help employees establish a...

Emerging markets offer posts a chance to diversify and support their core postal mission. We recently looked at four of these emerging markets – international mail forwarding, continuity shipping, digital printing, and private locked bags – and found the first three offer revenue generating...

The U.S. Postal Service is required to prefund its long-term pension and retiree healthcare liabilities. These liabilities, currently estimated at almost $404 billion, are based on assumptions that are highly uncertain and changeable. Our recent white paper evaluates these assumptions and other...

The U.S. Postal Service has a corporate brand. Its attributes include reliability, convenience, value, and tradition, among other things. Brand valuation is a management tool increasingly used by successful firms to get the most financial benefit from their brands. But unlike many other businesses...

We collaborated with the consulting firm InfoTrends to analyze three months’ worth of customer billing data from a major U.S. utility. We also jointly interviewed executives who manage bill delivery and payment processing to help determine how the utility’s delivery-and-payment costs and customer...