Federal Reports

At the request of the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and its contractor, Cotton & Company LLP, conducted a performance audit of the United States Capitol Police (USCP or the Department)'s Building Access Card (BAC) process. The objectives of this audit were to determine (1) if the Department had established adequate internal controls and procedures over USCP's badging and fingerprinting process to ensure that the risk of unauthorized personnel on the U.S. Capitol Complex was reduced to an acceptable level and (2) if USCP complied with applicable policies and procedures. The audit scope included controls, processes, and operations in place at USCP as of August 1, 2012.

This paper provides a documented overview of P2P digital commerce. It includes an examination of specific market facilitators that may be familiar names (eBay, Craigslist, etsy, and others) as well as newer P2P service facilitators such as Airbnb, Getaround, and TaskRabbit. Common attributes of facilitators are discussed, along with how payment processing and various customer service issues may be handled. The paper also identifies gaps and problems in today’s marketplace and discusses Postal Service products and services that exist today or may be developed in the future to facilitate this market.

As a follow-up to its paper, A Primer on Postal Costing Issues, the OIG asked Professor Michael D. Bradley of the Economics Department of George Washington University, an expert in postal economics, to co-author a paper on pricing and short-run costs. This paper defines what is meant by short-run and long-run costs, explores the issues associated with using short-run costs when developing prices, outlines what information is needed to measure short-run costs, and develops a multistep algorithm for estimating short-run costs that is consistent with the existing Postal Service cost system.