Federal Reports

Why We Did This Report

We conducted this inspection to determine the extent to which the EPA is using Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA, funds to progress remediation at the Diaz Chemical Corp. Superfund site and whether the EPA has site safety measures in place to protect public health and the environment.

Summary of Findings

The EPA has acted swiftly to address past complaints from the public, but conducting community interviews during five-year reviews would allow the EPA to confirm that there are no community concerns. Also, updating the community involvement plan and making it publicly available would ensure that the EPA’s approaches for community engagement remain relevant.

Background

The U.S. Postal Service delivers over 108 billion pieces of mail annually, and each piece requires an approved stamp or other payment indicator. Bad actors, however, are increasingly selling, printing, or distributing counterfeit stamps. To combat this threat to its finances and customers, the Postal Service and its primary law enforcement arm, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, focus on preventing counterfeit stamps from entering the mail system through public education, removing online fraud schemes, or partnering with other federal law enforcement to interdict illicit inbound shipments.

What We Did

Our objective was to evaluate the Postal Service and Postal Inspection Service’s efforts to mitigate the threat of counterfeit stamps. We reviewed related policies, initiatives, and data; engaged a contractor to assess online threats; and tested equipment.

What We Found

Postal Service and Postal Inspection Service mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network. While the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service have increased prevention-related efforts, the quantity of counterfeit stamps in the network remains unknown.

The Postal Service has not developed a comprehensive, risk-based strategy for identifying and mitigating counterfeit stamps. Developing such a strategy would help coordinate efforts across the organization, putting the Postal Service in a stronger position to protect its revenues and customers. The urgency of this threat also necessitates immediate actions to address other mitigation shortfalls. First, the Postal Service did not set mail processing equipment’s detection capabilities to a level to sufficiently detect counterfeit stamps or conduct sample testing to quantify the potential revenue loss. Second, the Postal Service has no identification capabilities across any other points of mail entry. We estimate these shortfalls resulted in over $349 million in revenue loss and $1.7 billion of revenue at risk in fiscal year 2026. Lastly, the Postal Service takes more than twice as long as comparable companies to disable online threats due to legal considerations.

Recommendations and Management’s Comments

We made four recommendations to address the issues identified in the report, and management agreed with all four. We consider management’s comments responsive, as corrective actions should resolve the issues. Management’s comments and our evaluation are at the end of each finding and recommendation

We found the selected nonstatistical sample of the FSA’s ECAP applications contained accurate information, but determined FSA should establish additional oversight activities for commodity information for self-certified applications the agency considered low risk.

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) three nuclear plants, Browns Ferry, Sequoyah, and Watts Bar, are capable of generating an average of 8,275 megawatts of electricity, making TVA the third-largest nuclear fleet in the United States.  In fiscal year 2025, TVA generated 56,157 million kilowatt hours of nuclear power, accounting for 33 percent of TVA’s total fleet power generation.  To maintain the nuclear fleet, TVA is making significant investment.  For fiscal year 2025, the TVA Board of Directors approved $257 million to support reliable operation of the seven units across TVA’s three nuclear plants. 

Due to potential risks to cost and schedule from rework, we performed an evaluation of contractor rework for nuclear projects at TVA.  The objectives were to evaluate TVA’s oversight of contractor rework and determine if rework was being handled in accordance with contract terms and conditions.  Our scope included active nuclear projects in the implementation phase.

We reviewed nine contracts associated with our sample of projects and identified rework was required for one.  We could not determine if all rework identified was handled in accordance with contract terms and conditions due to a lack of formal documentation and tracking of rework.  In addition, we identified a lack of guidance for oversight of rework.  Specifically, TVA and Nuclear’s project management Standard Programs and Processes do not define rework or provide any information on how rework should be documented and tracked, which contributed to the inability to determine if all rework was handled in accordance with contract terms and conditions.