Spring Semiannual Report
to Congress 2025

In recent years, we’ve seen a rise in criminal organizations that target postal employees to steal financial instruments from the mail, such as checks, credit cards, and debit cards. In this reporting period, our special agents closed 872 internal mail theft investigations, including some that were unabashedly harmful to both the Postal Service and its customers.

In one case, our investigators dismantled a massive a check theft ring that stole more than $24 million worth of business and U.S. Treasury checks from the mailstream in just a matter of months. A sole employee was pocketing the checks at a mail processing plant, which moves vast amounts of mail each day. She then handed them to two outside co-conspirators.

Our special agents dismantled the criminal enterprise, and the three suspects were sentenced to a combined 14 years in federal prison, with the employee receiving the longest sentence of five years. Each was also ordered to pay over $110,000 in restitution to the victims. This immersive digital story has the details.

Our audits also play a key complementary role to our mail theft investigations by evaluating efforts by USPS and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to mitigate and deter mail theft around the country. Our work includes a new audit series launched last fiscal year on the Postal Service’s mail theft mitigation and response. In this reporting period, we issued two reports for the Sacramento, CA, and Houston, TX, areas. Our semiannual report has the results of these audits and another report on USPS’s efforts to mitigate internal mail theft.

Drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are also targeting postal employees because of their access to the Postal Service’s vast network. We are as committed to bring such postal employees to justice as we are to dismantling these criminal groups.

In this reporting period, our special agents closed an investigation that disrupted a $1 million cocaine and fentanyl trafficking scheme moving the drugs from California to Long Island, NY. The joint investigation revealed a single postal employee delivered about 180 drug parcels to an outside dealer. The two were apprehended, convicted, and sentenced to five years’ probation and eight years’ imprisonment respectively. Read the full story for more details.

Our report highlights other significant narcotics cases we closed during this reporting period. And if you’d like to learn more about the work our special agents do — not just in mail theft and narcotics, but also in contract, financial, and health care fraud — you’ll enjoy reading our Investigative Case Highlights.

What does USPS mean by service performance? It’s the time it takes to deliver a mailpiece or package from acceptance through delivery, and our Field Operations Review Teams look at factors that affect it when conducting audits that reach every corner of the nation.

Responding to congressional requests or service performance indicators, we issued 27 reports covering five key areas during this reporting period. Of note is the Massachusetts-Rhode Island cluster of reports, which came in part as a response to a congressional delegation to review service performance, employee retention/vacancies, and select lease and facility suspensions in Massachusetts.

We found package scanning and handling issues at all three delivery units, and over 10,800 pieces of delayed mail at two units. More alarmingly, we identified 58 arrow keys that were missing at the three delivery units — arrow keys are a high-demand commodity in criminal circles, as they open the iconic blue collection boxes as well as cluster box units, like those in apartment buildings. Postal management was responsive to our findings, taking immediate action to address most issues identified in the interim reports.

Also of note was our work in the Alabama-Mississippi district, which was affected by the Postal Service’s changes to its transportation network. And beyond the Field Operations Reviews, our Office of Audit also conducted other service performance reviews: Florida’s third district saw significant issues with First Class Mail performance as did Michigan’s first district with Priority Mail Express.

The Postal Service is modernizing its aging fleet of over 227,000 delivery vehicles. That entails acquiring new vehicles and disposing of old long-life vehicles (LLV), which comprise about 44 percent of the fleet and have exceeded the projected 24-year life span.

Regarding the acquisition of new vehicles, we looked at USPS’s new delivery vehicles acquisition status, finding about 22,500 new delivery vehicles were acquired as of June 2024. The vehicles’ acquisition status was mixed, with some arriving on time, while others experiencing monthslong delays. Ongoing delays will continue to put the timelines for fleet modernization, cost savings, and sustainability at risk.

Our report also covered evaluated USPS’s management of Postal Vehicle Service operations, which use a fleet of delivery vehicles to move large mail volumes between postal sites, local firms, and mailers.

Regarding the disposal of old vehicles, we found USPS had ineffective controls over the LLV disposal program. We estimated over $452,500 in lost revenue for almost 11,260 disposals without associated scrappage payments between October 2023 and April 2024. We also estimated over $3.8 million in at-risk revenue for 95,320 planned LLV disposals.