The Postal Service is increasing the risk of fraud by approving invoices that lack descriptions of the goods or services being purchased, according to a Sept. 24 inspector general report.
Key facts: The audit focused on time-and-materials contracts, used when the price of a purchase can’t be estimated in advance. The inspector general estimated that 74% of the contracts, worth $271.1 million, were approved in 2024 and 2025 even though the Postal Service couldn’t verify that the purchases were delivered.
Some invoices were approved even though they didn’t list how many items were delivered or how many hours a contractor spent doing labor. Others didn’t list any supplier, the IG found.
The audit found similar issues with 60% of unauthorized contractual commitments, which is an informal contract used after an employee accidentally orders a purchase despite having no authority to do so. An estimated $795,000 was spent on informal contracts that were missing required details.
More issues were identified with no-bid contracts. Postal Service workers are supposed to get multiple price quotes before buying something for more than $1 million, or get approval from a supervisor to bypass that process. The audit found $792 million of no-bid contracts that went through without the proper approval.
Procurement fraud is not unheard of in the Postal Service. The inspector general previously found 458 instances of fraud and recovered $321.3 million from 2016 to 2025. Multiple contractors admitted to editing invoices or inflating the number of hours they worked.
Background: The Postal Service typically doesn’t receive taxpayer funding and operates entirely from postage fees, but that is rarely enough money. The agency has operated at a loss nearly every year since 2007.
Budget losses increase the risk that taxpayers will eventually have to subsidize the agency. That already happened in 2020, when Congress wrote the Postal Service a $10 billion check, and in 2022, when Medicare took on $57 billion worth of retiree healthcare costs the Postal Service was supposed to pay on its own.
Meanwhile, the Postal Service paid its employees a record $42.8 billion in 2025. Postmaster General David Steiner earned $350,260, the highest salary in Post Office history.
Summary: With the Postal Service’s business model already in question, the agency must be certain it’s only paying for goods and services it actually received.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
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[ H/T WorldNetDaily ]
