2026 Spring Semiannual Report to Congress

October 1, 2025 - March 31, 2026

Protecting the Postal Service — and public trust — through audits, investigations, and research.

Our Work

We are the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (USPS OIG), charged with ensuring the efficiency, accountability, and integrity of the United States Postal Service and its regulator, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). Our work plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity of America’s postal system, its revenue and assets, and its employees.

“I’m proud to lead this lean and efficient organization dedicated to rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse within America’s postal system.”

– Tammy L. Hull
Inspector General, U.S. Postal Service

Over the last six months, even as we operated with lean resources and a government shutdown, our impact remained visible and measurable.

We issued 38 audit reports and management advisories that provided 89 recommendations to postal management...

...and identified over $401 million in questioned costs. This work also uncovered over $2.3 billion in revenue impact to USPS and alerted management to key system vulnerabilities.

Our investigations were also vital to USPS and the PRC, with OIG special agents completing 1,179 investigations during this reporting period.

Our investigations led to 433 arrests, 357 convictions, and over $91 million in fines, restitution, and recoveries, of which more than $13 million was returned to the Postal Service.

This digital story provides a quick recap of the two main areas of our work featured in our 2026 Spring Semiannual Report to Congress.

Postal Finances

Congressional and public concern about the Postal Service’s financial condition — and its ability to deliver mail on time — has intensified. In this report, we highlight the work most directly tied to these challenges: postal finances, service performance, and investigative efforts protecting USPS’s bottom line.

“At our current rate, we’ll be out of cash in less than 12 months. So in about a year from now, the Postal Service would be unable to deliver the mail.”

– Postmaster General David Steiner testifying before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations on March 17, 2026

As Congress, postal executives, and policy experts weigh options to stabilize postal finances, the OIG expanded our financial oversight through two key resources: a white paper that examines USPS’s financial history and a new public-facing dashboard on postal finances.

The paper looks at the major economic, legislative, and operational changes that have affected the Postal Service and led to 18 years of consecutive net losses. And the USPS Deeper Dive: Financials & Productivity Dashboard (shown here) is a one-stop resource that provides users easy access to key postal financial metrics dating back as far as 2005. Anyone looking to better understand the past and possible future of postal finances will find these resources useful.

Our semiannual report also highlights audits that found opportunities for financial improvement. This work includes an audit on the Postal Service’s growing backlog of facility and infrastructure maintenance issues totaling about $20 billion, and an audit on how USPS can effectively manage excess or underutilized space at the over 34,000 properties it has in the United States and its territories. With an estimated $14.8 million in potential lost rental revenue, we proposed changes that could lead to more productive and cost-effective facility usage and operations.

Our semiannual report shines a light on how our Offices of Audit and Investigations stand at the ready to protect the Postal Service by detecting and preventing fraud.

During our audit process, we sometimes uncover issues that require immediate notification to the Postal Service due to their urgency. Our management alerts serve this very purpose.

For instance, during an audit that is still underway on USPS’s efforts against counterfeit postage, we found significant financial losses involving a system that can be used to buy package labels. Our management alert — the second alert we’ve issued for this audit — determined the Postal Service lost over $537 million in revenue from February through December 2025. If the agency doesn’t address this problem, we project it will lose an additional $1.3 billion this year.

Our Office of Investigations has five primary program areas that investigate fraud targeting the Postal Service, among these, fraud committed by USPS employees who receive benefits and payments through the Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs. In this semiannual report, we highlighted a case where an employee stayed on USPS’s rolls for over 14 years while claiming to be disabled due to a work-related injury. In reality, she lived a very active lifestyle, which she openly documented online.

When our special agents brought the employee to justice, she was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and ordered to pay back almost $650,000 to USPS. By stopping this fraudster, it prevented the Postal Service from making over $1.1 million in future fraudulent payments.

Our oversight of service performance is critical for the Postal Service to achieve financial sustainability and keep the public trust. Of note is an audit that looked at the launch of the Indianapolis Regional Processing and Distribution Center (RPDC), which had challenges similar to other RPDC launches.

Specifically, we found significant deviations from the original operating plan increased costs and would and offset expected savings of $40 million. And we identified over $20 million in funds that could have been put to better use due to the purchase of unnecessary and unused mail sorting equipment that could have been repurposed from other facilities.

Postal Crime

This reporting period, our special agents partnered across jurisdictions — using data analytics and investigative tradecraft — to dismantle criminal networks, recover funds, and deter insider participation. In fact, our special agents closed an investigation into the largest known mail theft conspiracy involving the highest number of collusive postal employees.

Our special agents and their law enforcement partners uncovered 35 postal employees who aided at least 13 gang members (including the ringleader) to steal credit cards and other valuables from the mail. The group stole from and compromised the identities of over 10,300 victims and clocked in losses at over $6 million with an additional $46.6 million in intended losses — meaning, had they maxed out every card, the damages could have been almost eight times higher.

Ultimately, 27 defendants were convicted and sentenced in federal court to a combined total of nearly 36 years’ imprisonment. The defendants were also ordered to pay their victims back a combined total of over $6 million.

Our report also covers another major mail theft case out of St. Louis, MO, and our work to disrupt narcotics smuggling through the U.S. Mail. One case out of Yonkers, NY, found a postal employee was intercepting and diverting drug parcels coming in from Arizona and California. When our special agents and their law enforcement partners arrested the employee, they found he had about 300 grams of fentanyl — an amount that could have led to 150,000 fatalities. The employee was eventually found guilty and received a severe sentence of 15 years in prison and $65,000 in forfeiture.

We invite you to read this latest Semiannual Report to Congress to learn more about the impact our work delivered over the last six months — this digital story is just the beginning.

And for the latest updates on our work, be sure to subscribe to our emails or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Threads.