USPS OIG – Retail Systems Continuity of Operations

Background
The U.S. Postal Service developed an overarching Continuity of Operations (COOP) plan that allows essential business functions to continue when there is a disruption of normal operations. In support of that plan, the Postal Service developed the Retail Systems COOP (Plan) to provide a methodology for continuing retail operations in the event of a complete Retail Systems Software (RSS) system failure or power or network outage. The Plan ensures that field retail operations provides a limited scope of products and services with minimal customer service impact if retail systems automated functions become unavailable. In fiscal year (FY) 2021 post office retail revenue was over $13 billion.
What We Did
Our objective was to determine whether field offices properly managed retail activities in the event of a disruption to RSS normal operations. We visited top retail units from all four Postal Service areas based on FY 2020 walk-in revenue data.

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