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Audit: Postal workers marked thousands of items sitting in Raleigh post office as delivered

Inspectors with the U.S. Postal Service found thousands of pieces of mail sitting undelivered in a Raleigh post office last fall and found that workers had marked items sitting in the station as being delivered, according to a recent audit.

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By
Matthew Burns
, WRAL.com senior producer/politics editor, & Adam Owens, WRAL anchor/reporter
RALEIGH, N.C. — Inspectors with the U.S. Postal Service found thousands of pieces of mail sitting undelivered in a Raleigh post office last fall and found that workers had marked items sitting in the station as being delivered, according to a recent audit.

A team from the Postal Service's Office of the Inspector General visited the Avent Ferry Station in southwest Raleigh in November because of a high number of "stop the clock" scans performed there. The scans mark an item as being delivered, available for pick-up at the post office or that postal workers couldn't make a delivery because of a lack of access to the location, a dangerous dog or other situation.

During the on-site visit, the inspectors found mail that should have already been delivered sitting in the post office. The mail was from 27 of the 58 city routes and four of the 17 rural routes served by the Avent Ferry Station, and they extrapolated that to estimate 6,230 letters and packages had been delayed on that day alone.

Local postal managers blamed the delays on staffing shortages – 17 carrier positions were vacant at the time – overburdened routes and mail arriving late from regional processing centers.

But the inspectors found that the Avent Ferry Station staff under-reported delayed mail to Postal Service managers and that they sometimes marked items as delivered even before they left the post office.

Between last May and September, 41,548 packages had a "stop the clock" scan done at the post office, with all but about 180 of them marked as delivered, according to the audit. In a random sample of 98 packages during their November visit, the team found a third had been marked delivered and 14 others had been scanned as "no access," "no secure location" or "animal interference," even though the scans were done up to 11 miles from the delivery address.

"Customers rely on accurate scan data to track their packages in real time. When employees do not scan mailpieces correctly, customers are unable to determine the actual status of their packages," the audit states.

Inspectors also found postal vehicles routinely left unlocked at the station, postal workers without masks and a general lack of cleaning during the pandemic.

"Something needs to be done, and it needs to be more than just having the complaints pile up," Raleigh resident Carol Gehringer said Wednesday.

Gehringer, who is in the area served by the Avent Ferry Station, said she's had mail that took weeks to arrive when it should have taken only days.

Other postal service customers suggested the problems aren't confined to one post office.

Deb Newton said she's had packages move quickly across the country only to get tied up in North Carolina.

“They didn’t arrive, and they didn’t arrive, and they didn’t arrive,” Newton said. "The packages literally got to Greensboro in two days and sat there for weeks."

She also recalled a check that was late.

"When I went down to the post office, sure enough, it was in the back,” she said.

Russell Gardner, manager of the Postal Service's Greensboro District, which oversees the Avent Ferry Station, agreed with all of the findings in the audit and said staffing and training at the station are being upgraded.

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