The Postal Regulator's Last Watchdog Report Before It Was Dissolved

The Postal Regulatory Commission's own Office of Inspector General -- the small in-house watchdog that existed from 2007 until Congress dissolved it on October 2, 2022 -- spent over a year examining how the agency's four purchase-card holders spent public money.▸ In Inspection Report #20-02-A01⧉, issued June 30, 2022, it found $23,112 in payments processed above PRC's own $10,000 Chairman-approval threshold with no documented sign-off, a three-person finance department where one official held four incompatible roles at once, and a departing cardholder's card that sat un-confirmed-deactivated for 17 days. The report -- one of the PRC OIG's last -- landed roughly three months before PRC's own page⧉ says Congress's Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 folded that oversight function into the U.S. Postal Service's Office of Inspector General for good.

The OIG sampled 140 purchase-card transactions⧉ from the roughly two-year window between October 2018 and September 2020.▸ It flagged two payment groups where a PRC cardholder paid the same vendor multiple times on the same day, and the combined total blew past the $10,000 threshold above which PRC policy requires the Chairman's prior approval. One cardholder made two $5,652.48 parking payments to the same vendor the same day -- a January 2019 invoice totaling $11,304 that covered a carried-over December balance plus that month's charges for 23 leased spaces. A second cardholder paid an online legal-services vendor three times, $3,936 each, on February 25, 2019, for a combined $11,808 covering invoices dated back to November 2018. Neither instance carried the Chairman's documented approval PRC's own policy requires above $10,000.

PRC pushed back on how the OIG framed this.▸ In its written response⧉, management agreed to document approvals going forward but disputed that either instance was an improper split transaction -- it said the totals reflected several already-under-$10,000 recurring monthly charges that a vendor happened to consolidate onto one invoice, not an attempt to dodge the cap. The OIG's own report doesn't resolve that disagreement; it records both the finding and PRC's rebuttal side by side. What both sides agree on: PRC's purchasing policy has no defined disciplinary consequence for split transactions at all -- despite PRC telling the OIG's 2018 predecessor audit that it would add one.

The deeper issue the OIG found wasn't any single payment -- it was who was watching them.▸ PRC's Finance Department is staffed by three people who handle all of the Commission's budgeting, accounting, contracting, and procurement, PRC's own response states⧉. Within that staff, the OIG found one approving official simultaneously held the roles of Acting Financial Manager, Comptroller, Contracting Officer Representative, and Credit Card Authorizing Official (CCAO) -- the very official meant to independently oversee the purchase-card program the same person was authorizing purchases within.

The OIG benchmarked this against the Postal Service's own purchase-card handbook, which treats the CCAO's monitoring role and an approving official's purchase authority as distinct jobs.▸ PRC agreed in principle but noted, correctly, that comparing a three-person finance shop to an organization with more than 500,000 USPS employees⧉ isn't a like-for-like fix -- it committed only to study "best practices for micro agencies."

That staffing crunch shows up again in a signature the OIG couldn't verify.▸ Reviewing a bank-statement reconciliation for the period ending May 18, 2019, investigators could not determine⧉ whether the cardholder's and the CCAO's signatures were even from two different people -- and PRC's own administrative staff, asked to check nearly three years later, said they couldn't tell either. The CCAO on that document had actually left PRC on May 11, 2019; both signatures are dated May 21, 2019 -- ten days after that departure. Separately, a cardholder who left PRC on February 16, 2019 had a purchase card the agency could not confirm was deactivated until March 5 -- 17 days later by calendar count, though the report itself states 18 -- and PRC couldn't locate that employee's exit checklist at all when the OIG asked for it.

Delegation letters compounded the gap: PRC's own July 2019 and March 2020 authorization letters granted the Commission Secretary and two deputies $20,000 in non-recurring purchase authority -- double what PRC's written policy allows without the Chairman's sign-off -- and no PRC official could tell the OIG why.

The OIG issued 14 recommendations.▸ By the time PRC filed its written response on June 28, 2022, the Commission had already marked 7 of them Completed -- overhauling exit-checklist forms, committing to name a backup CCAO when one departs, requiring timely written requests for event catering -- while the other 7 carried target completion dates through September 2023. PRC concurred with every recommendation, even the four whose underlying facts it disputed. What the report can't show is whether those 7 "Completed" items held up: PRC's own page⧉ confirms the Commission's in-house Inspector General ceased to exist on October 2, 2022, three months after this report was issued, when the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 shifted PRC oversight permanently to the U.S. Postal Service's Office of Inspector General. No PRC-specific inspection has re-tested this report's findings since.