PRC contracts: $377K unsigned, 89% of value sole-sourced

The Postal Regulatory Commission regulates U.S. Postal Service mail rates and, through its Annual Compliance Determination⧉, tracks whether USPS is meeting its own on-time delivery standards.▸ Its own contracting doesn't hold up to the same scrutiny: a USPS Office of Inspector General audit⧉ of 36 PRC contract files worth $2,619,329 found $376,877 in purchase orders that vendors never signed -- meaning they weren't legally binding agreements at all -- and found that 89% of the dollar value in the PRC's own self-drafted contracts was awarded without any competitive bidding.

Of the 23 purchase orders the OIG reviewed, 10 -- totaling $376,877 -- were never signed by the vendor⧉.▸ The PRC uses Postal Service Form 8203 to issue purchase orders, and when that form isn't formalized and signed on both sides, the OIG found, it doesn't establish a mutually binding legal relationship -- the PRC was committing money to suppliers with no enforceable agreement obligating either side to deliver. That's about a third of the entire $1,121,141 in purchase-order value the audit covered. Separately, 11 of the 23 purchase orders were renewals of recurring services, but the PRC hadn't kept the underlying original service agreement on file, so auditors couldn't even confirm those purchases were justified in the first place.

The PRC's own 13 self-negotiated contracts fared little better on process.▸ Twelve of them -- 89% of the $1,498,188 in combined contract value -- were awarded sole-source⧉, with no competitive bid solicited. Only one contract, worth $159,529, went through a competitive process. The PRC operates outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation: it's exempt from federal procurement law under 39 U.S.C. 504(e), the same exemption structure that covers USPS itself, and instead runs on a purchasing policy the agency wrote in September 2011 and hadn't substantively updated since a September 2013 reissue -- a decade unchanged at the time of this audit.

Beyond the money, the paperwork itself was incomplete.▸ Auditors identified 54 documents missing across the 13 PRC-drafted contract files⧉ -- roughly four per file on average -- plus three more present but missing required signatures. Eleven of the missing documents were market-research files meant to justify a purchase before it's made; another 11 were the source-selection or best-value determinations that document why a winning bid was chosen; and 11 more were notices of award, the basic record that a contract was formally granted at all. The PRC had no checklist or oversight tool at the time requiring that this documentation be completed and retained for every acquisition type.

Six of the 13 PRC-drafted contracts, worth $466,118, were closed out during the audit's scope period -- but the PRC's purchasing policy has no requirements at all for what a proper contract closeout looks like.▸ Those closed files sometimes lacked the financial review needed to verify invoices were paid and spending matched budget, or the certification that goods and services were actually received as specified. During the review, PRC management couldn't even determine which contracts were closed⧉, because the agency lacks direct access to its own financial records inside the Postal Service's enterprise accounting system -- it has to go through USPS to see its own books. The OIG is explicit that it found no proven monetary losses tied to either the contracting-vehicle gaps or the closeout gaps; these are documentation and oversight failures, not confirmed instances of overpayment or theft.