Posted on 03/09/2003 11:18:55 PM PST by TexRef
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WASHINGTON — They bark like a pack of dogs, quack like a flock of ducks and hiss like a nest of vipers.
They wrap each other from head to toe in toilet paper and aluminium foil and pipe cleaners.
They build sandcastles and gingerbread houses and practice picking up oranges while blindfolded.
These are the professional auditors and investigators who police the United States Postal Service.
The mission of the USPS Office of Inspector General is to make the mail more efficient and cost-effective by rooting out waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement.
Yet hundreds of IG staffers have been taking part in bizarre bonding and team-building exercises and playing goofy games that burn up millions of dollars — and appear to do little or nothing to curb postal inefficiencies, a Daily News investigation found.
As stamp prices and postal deficits soared over the past few years, the agency's well-paid, highly trained employees got a lesson in scat singing, took an outing to a racetrack — and delved into the history of the Civil War during a $100,000 retreat to the battlefield at Gettysburg.
On USPS time, they've composed Christmas carols, belted out "We Are Family" at sing-alongs, conducted mock trials in which witnesses were paraded before a judge and jury — and played children's games like follow the leader.
Under the supervision of Postal Inspector General Karla Corcoran, civil servants have been paid to emit animal sounds, embark on treasure hunts, dress in cat costumes and seek the counsel of make-believe wizards, magicians and mad scientists at mass gatherings of the workforce.
They've been jetting into the capital from 15 field offices around the nation for "annual recognition conferences" that celebrate the organization and its values. The tab for the last three confabs: $3.6 million, including planning and salary costs.
At one such event, at the Renaissance Washington D.C. Hotel in January 2002, a blindfolded and barefoot Corcoran was swaddled in a blue blanket and hoisted into the air above a hotel ballroom on colored ropes and strings manipulated by some 500 of her 725 employees.
The point of lifting the boss skyward: To show that by working together as a team, they could accomplish a task that would have been impossible to perform alone.
$117 million
Who foots the bill for these shenanigans? You do. Every penny of the IG's $117 million annual budget comes from the stamp-buying public.
"Each time your Aunt Minnie sticks a 37-cent stamp on an envelope, she's funding an agency that's off track, off message, off mission — and off its rocker," said Leslie Paige, vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, which tracks the misspending of public funds.
So much agency time, energy and money has been consumed in retreats, conferences, picnics, parties and game-playing, team-building outings that the mandate to ferret out USPS ineptitude has taken a back seat, a dozen current and former employees told The News.
"Touchy-feely bonding exercises, management retreats at first-class hotels and annual celebratory events all divert resources that could be better invested in audits and investigations," said Debra Ritt, the agency's former No. 1 auditor.
After some 50 past and present staffers approached Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley with allegations of waste and mismanagement, the Iowa Republican launched a probe of Corcoran's six-year tenure as IG.
"I question whether spending tens of thousands of dollars for an afternoon of treasure hunting sets the gold standard for prudence," Grassley told The News. The President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which polices the federal inspector-general community, also is probing the allegations.
Keeping mum
Corcoran, who has run the office since it was created in 1997, refused interview requests over a three-week period. It would be "inappropriate" to comment, a spokeswoman said, while the investigation is going on.
The $142,500-a-year IG — a veteran of former Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government initiative — serves at the pleasure of the USPS Board of Governors and is in the last year of a seven-year term.
In written responses to questions, the agency said its audits and probes of postal operations have identified $2.2 billion in potential, projected and actual savings during the past six years.
Its team-and-leadership development programs mirror those offered by corporate giants and consume only minimal resources, officials claim. They help workers learn more about each other, and themselves, so they can discover novel ways to think and work together.
The exercises also teach acceptance of five core workplace values that the agency instills in all staffers: teamwork, leadership, communication, creativity and conceptualization — better known in IG parlance as "TLC3."
Wrapping people in toilet paper, for instance, displayed teamwork; building sandcastles showed creativity; mimicking animals involved conceptualization. Besides, said agency spokeswoman Laura Whitaker, when "fun and humor" are integrated into the workplace, people become more productive and creative and absenteeism and downtime plummet.
Fun and humor, however, is not how ex-employees such as John Rooney, a former special assistant to Corcoran, describe the organization.
"We were forced to play silly games, build gingerbread houses and sing songs praising Karla, and I found the whole thing humiliating, demoralizing and nonproductive," Rooney said.
Adds Ritt, "Auditors tend to be private, analytical and conservative. Making them sing to large groups, orate and give testimonials shows a lack of respect for their professionalism."
As for "TLC3," employees say it's an agency obsession. In E-mail messages obtained by The News, they've been told to play a "values game" and embark on a "values journey" that uses zany clues to test their TLC3 IQ.
"We never really focused on how we could make the Postal Service better because we were always focused on how much we loved TLC3," said Billy Sauls, the agency's former top investigator.
Among the games the office of inspector general plays:
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OK, so what's the breakdown.
I'm guessing that it's $2 billion in the potential and projected categories and $200 million in the actual category. (Then again, maybe I'm just being too darned optimistic.)
Liberals.
USPS Gets a New Watchdog
When Karla Corcoran was appointed Inspector General of the Postal Service nearly a year ago, she started out with a staff of one: herself. Drawing on past experience, which includes guiding hundreds of employees at Air Force audit offices around the world, she has had to build from scratch an entirely new office within the Postal Service.
Corcoran describes herself as a non-traditional Inspector General who encourages creativity by her staff. The spartan, no-nonsense appearance of her office suite reflects a work still in progress. But Corcoran, friendly and gracious, has immersed herself in the postal culture, and she says she's impressed with what she's found.
"It's very, very different from what I would have ever thought of the Postal Service from the outside," says Corcoran, who is a former Assistant Auditor General for the Air Force and has held high-level management positions at several federal agencies.
"I basically thought of the Postal Service as being bureaucratic. While it touched your life and you received mail every day, I really had no idea about the types of products and services that it offered other than stamps and the delivery of mail," Corcoran continues. "It's amazing when you consider all the components, the people and the systems that have to work to process and deliver the mail. I've been very impressed with how postal employees are trying to drive the Postal Service into the 21st century."
The Inspector General is independent of postal management and reports directly to the nine presidentially appointed Governors. Corcoran was appointed to a seven-year term by the Governors. Prior to the establishment of this separate office, the duties of Inspector General were performed by the Chief Postal Inspector, who reports to the Postmaster General.
Nearly a year after being sworn in — January 6 is her anniversary — Corcoran acknowledges that the newly created Office of Inspector General continues to evolve. Staff is being hired. Responsibilities are being delineated. Corcoran has had to build the OIG infrastructure, which included assembling a transition team, developing a pay and benefits package for her office, and identifying those functions that will be performed by the OIG and those that will remain with the Postal Inspection Service.
Employees who want to report fraud, waste, abuse or mismanagement can call (888) USPS-OIG or [(888) 877-7644].
By SARAH LUECK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A conference room is littered with toys, especially stuffed pigs (for "postal inspector general"), including one with wings suspended overhead (as in, "when pigs fly," a slap at naysayers who fought the office's creation). Cubicle assignments are random, scattering workers throughout their Arlington, Va., headquarters to combat interoffice balkanization, but employees say communication suffers.
Now some of Ms. Corcoran's subordinates are wondering, should somebody be watching the watchdog? The problem is that her efforts to be different are, in critics' eyes, costly and downright weird. Scores of current and former employees have complained to Congress and to the Postal Service's Board of Governors. The board alerted the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, the IG community's self-policing body, which opened an investigation, and Ms. Corcoran has engaged a private attorney. The office of Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Finance Committee, also is investigating.
She regularly has food for "working lunch" meetings brought in, charging $8,600 worth of meals to an office credit card in a recent nine-month period. "You do what is required of you to get the job done," she explains. She bought a $5,515 treadmill for her management team, because the gym in the building closes at 7 p.m., too early for late workers. After deciding the purchase might be "perceived incorrectly," she says, she returned it unused -- which cost $940 in shipping and restocking fees.
I know that when I worked at Compaq, I didn't get a bonus check if the company was losing money. These guys just write themselves another rate increase.
What the?!?!
l
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