Ah,
witness is, ah Tammy Hall. Ah,
she is the Inspector General of the US Postal Service.
The, the Governors of the Postal Service appointed her
to that position in 2018.
Prior to her appointment,
MS Hall served as the acting inspector general and the deputy
inspector general and has served as the OIG since 2005 M.
Hall. Ah, you are recognized for your,
thank you.
Good morning, Chairman Peters, ranking member, Paul and members of the committee.
Thank you for inviting me to discuss our work.
The Postal Service issued its delivering for America plan three years
ago and is now accelerating network changes across the country.
The OIG is committed to keeping pace with
these changes and providing robust oversight and transparency.
We've completed several audits related to the plan and more are in progress.
We're finding that as the postal service implements these changes,
significant operational issues are arising that affect service
to customers and take time to resolve our work
is showing that better local co ordination and
execution could likely prevent some of this disruption.
Last September,
we issued an audit examining the initial sorting and
delivery centers or S and D CS in Florida,
Georgia, Texas,
Massachusetts and New York.
Overall,
we found these facilities operated successfully
but there were opportunities for improvement.
The Postal Service did not communicate sufficiently with high
volume customers often providing information at the last minute.
In addition, some facilities opened before renovations were complete.
So employees had to work around construction projects,
transportation changes and also delayed delivery to po box customers.
Leading to complaints.
The Postal service launched its
first regional processing and distribution center
or RPN DC last July at an existing plant in Richmond,
Virginia.
A
recent audit of the repurpose facility found
significant problems prior to making changes,
the Postal service had not addressed staffing and other issues that
we had raised in our 2021 and 2022 audits of the facility
transportation planning for the new facility was also insufficient
leading to a 700% increase in extra trips.
In addition,
on the ground operations did not always match the new
integrated plan for the Richmond plant and its supporting facilities.
This was partly due to inadequate co-ordination
with local management and ongoing changes.
After the launch,
local management said they did not fully understand the new mail
flow within the facility and were not solicited for input.
The postal service also did not hold
public input meetings for the Richmond changes.
We examined whether the postal service was required to
provide public notice and found its policy was unclear.
The postal service said its decision not to provide public
notice complied with its long standing interpretation of the law
but this interpretation was not documented in policy.
Three months after the opening of the RPN DC,
the postal service made an additional change within
the region covered by the Richmond facility.
For the first time.
It implemented its local transportation optimization initiative.
Under this initiative at some post offices,
collection mail received throughout the day is held overnight
to reduce the number of trips and associated costs
in the Richmond region.
86% of the affected zip codes were in rural
areas potentially leaving these rural customers with slower service.
Following implementation,
first class mail on time service performance in the
Richmond region dropped about 21% points to 65%.
Unfortunately,
we cannot isolate how much of the service decline resulted from
this initiative compared to other events such as peak season.
As the postal service expands this transportation initiative to other locations.
We will monitor it and other network changes.
We have audits currently underway of the roll out of new RPND,
CS in Georgia and Oregon
and additional S and D CS.
And we will evaluate implementation challenges
that could both reduce service and increase
the risk that the postal service may not achieve its potential savings.
We also continue to focus on service performance more broadly
and recently reviewed clusters of facilities in Missouri,
Minnesota, North Dakota, California and Washington DC
to evaluate service issues and recommend solutions.
Additionally, following media reports of undelivered packages,
we visited a South Houston facility in January and
found 384,000 pieces of delayed mail and mostly packages.
The postal service had moved operations from another plant but staffing
equipment and logistics were not aligned with the new workload.
Our recent report details these issues.
Another critical focus area for us this year is
the Postal service's readiness for the November election,
particularly as network changes are made.
We plan to release our election mail readiness audit in late summer
and will conduct a separate audit of
postal service ballot processing during the November election
as we did in 2020 oig auditors and investigators will make hundreds of visits
to deliver units and plants around the
country to observe operations and flag problems.
We want to help ensure the postal service continues to deliver for voters.
Thank you for the opportunity to share our work and I'm happy to answer questions.