Federal Reports

This interim report presents the results of our self-initiated audit of mail delivery, customer service, and property conditions at the Saint Peters Main Post Office (MPO) in Saint Peters, MO (Project Number 22-115-1). The Saint Peters MPO is in the Kansas-Missouri District of the Central Area and services ZIP Code 63376, which serves about 71,535 people and is considered to be urban. We judgmentally selected the Saint Peters MPO based on the number of customer inquiries per route the unit received. From December 1, 2021 through February 28, 2022, the unit received 12.54 inquiries per route, which was more than the average of 7.02 inquiries per route for all sites serviced by the St. Louis Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC).

Our objective for this report was to assess the company’s efforts to address challenges in recruiting and retaining skilled engineering managers as it recovers from the pandemic and builds for the future.We found that the company is fully aware of the difficulties of recruiting and retaining skilled engineering managers in today’s labor market and has taken steps to address them. These steps include establishing meaningful pay differences between managers and subordinates, benchmarking management compensation with market rates, increasing salaries for field engineers, and offering one-time bonuses to entice agreement employees to move into management positions. In addition, the company recently commissioned a compensation analysis that will benchmark its salaries and determine appropriate rates for management positions company-wide. The analysis, scheduled to be completed this summer, is the first such review since 2014. We also found that the company has additional opportunities to build on these efforts, to include codifying existing policies on compensation and using workforce data to assess the effectiveness of its recruitment and retention effort for engineering managers.To address the report’s findings, we recommended that the company 1) establish formal compensation policies that define a schedule for regularly conducting analyses to identify whether the company is offering market-competitive salaries and communicate the policy to all relevant parties, 2) routinely analyze common workforce metrics such as employee turnover and share the metrics with relevant departments through existing workforce management tools, and 3) Use the common workforce metrics to assess the effectiveness of recent efforts to address compensation or work-life balance issues and determine whether further adjustments are needed.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) is initiating an audit of Third-Party Service Provider Agreements. Our overall objective is to determine the extent to which the services provided by third-party organizations align with the terms of existing service agreements.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) is initiating an audit of the Commission’s Contract Administration Process. Our overall objectives is to determine whether and to what extent the staffing shortfalls in the Office of Contracting Policy impacted the ability to manage and administer the contract administration process.