A United States Postal Service (USPS) office that opened in the Houston area last year to help move mail during the peak season ended up being jammed with nearly 400,000 delayed parcels – because of staffing shortages, oversights by management, reporting errors, lapses in communication, safety issues and a general state of disarray – according to an audit released this week by the USPS Office of Inspector General.
The audit of the new mail processing center in Missouri City, based on a site visit in late January and subsequent interviews with local USPS management, detailed a series of problems that contributed to widespread delivery delays late last year and early this year. During the visit from Jan. 28-30, inspectors found about 160,000 pieces of mail that had yet to be processed and an additional 224,000 items that were waiting to be shipped to other locations around the country.
The Office of Inspector General (OIG), an independent accountability agency for the USPS, examined the facility after Houston-area Congress members Sylvia Garcia and Al Green called for answers and an investigation into mail delivery delays reported to them by constituents. They also said they were told about delays at a regional processing center in North Houston, which the Missouri City facility was intended to complement.
