Postal workers entrusted with ballots, paychecks faked their own customer satisfaction surveys

Postal workers entrusted to deliver election ballots and paychecks faked their own customer satisfaction scores with two schemes that manipulated required consumer surveys, and their managers failed to properly stamp out the "underlying culture" of cheating, the mail service's internal watchdog revealed in a bombshell report.

The U.S. Postal Service inspector general (IG) found that "widespread manipulation" of C360 customer service surveys resulted in an inflated 5 percent spike in consumer satisfaction with mail service between 2023 and 2025, and data doctoring persisted even after one cheating scheme was uncovered. The USPS IG said in a statement that it "evaluated controls implemented after the Postal Service reported a scheme of manipulated surveys to our office. We also analyzed 40.2 million customer service requests and responses from FYs 2023 to 2025."

"We found employees created fake issues so when they received the customer satisfaction survey at their personal email addresses, they could complete the surveys with favorable results," the watchdog reported. "Secondly, we found a coordinated 'booster' effort in one area where employees improperly entered normal interactions (like daily mail delivery) as customer issues to generate surveys that were then manipulated to inflate local C360 scores."

You can read the full report here.

A trust betrayed

The watchdog made clear the problems went beyond rank-and-file employees to managers, who created "excessive pressure to raise customer satisfaction scores [...] Although management was aware of these schemes, it did not address the underlying culture driving score manipulation," the inspector general said. "Some employees faced pressure, at times, from supervisors who benefited from the misconduct.

"Additionally, we found weaknesses in policy, deterrence measures, and processes that allowed this misconduct to persist. Without corrective action, the integrity of C360 reporting will remain compromised, potentially exposing the Postal Service to fines... from uncorrected, inaccurate reporting," it added.

Customer service surveys have been mandated by the Postal Regulatory Commission. 

One area where survey results were consistently manipulated involved the USPS "email us" system for customer support, which saw an explosion of favorable feedback that was manipulated. The scheme was detected in each region of the country, the report suggested.

"We found this ongoing, targeted scheme exploited several categories of service request types," the report said. "One category that was most significantly exploited originating from 'Email Us' was facility service requests, which are intended to alert the Postal Service to issues with lobby appearance, wait times, mail collection, PO Boxes, retail transactions, passport services, forms/supplies, or troubles with equipment."

Another scheme was more prevalent on the West Coast: a regional “booster campaign” to increase local survey scores by improperly submitting service requests that were resolved at first contact.

Recommendations made but ignored by managers as an "overstatement"

The watchdog recommended a half-dozen fixes, including that top executives:

• Issue guidance instructing Area Vice Presidents and District Management not to issue artificial, unrealistic performance goals; 
• Evaluate its current Customer 360 scoring system and implement scoring system changes to address pressure to manipulate survey scores, including specifically evaluating fraud or quality indicators;
• Monitor booster activity during the upcoming year and take action to address if booster activity increases; 
• Establish deterrents, including rules and system controls, to temporarily or permanently suspend Customer 360 system access to address known, repeat offenders;
• Develop a holistic escalation process for documenting, escalating, and addressing suspected misconduct schemes; and
• Examine and update USPS survey impact analysis to include all suspected fraudulent surveys and report updated Customer 360 scores for fiscal years 2023, 2024, and 2025 to the Postal Regulatory Commission.

The postal service management acknowledged there are suspect survey results but insisted its own internal watchdog may have "overstated the severity of this issue."

The inspector general rebuked the USPS management for failing to take the findings and recommendations seriously, noting that executives rejected all six recommendations and claimed they could not replicate the cheating data. "We consider management’s comments unresponsive to recommendations 1 through 6 and will pursue the disagreements through the audit resolution process," the IG said.

The faked survey data is the latest in a long line of controversy for the Postal Service, which admits on its own inspector general website that it has recorded nearly two decades of continuous losses.

"The Postal Service mitigated 18 years of recorded net losses by maximizing its debt limit, suspending some retiree payments, postponing infrastructure maintenance, and freezing capital spending," it states.