To provide, consistent with its mission, postal services to everyone in the United States, the Postal Service operates an expansive network of facilities throughout the nation. Our analysis of Postal Service data shows there are approximately 34,000 active owned or leased postal facilities, most of which provide retail services. The Postal Service 2006 annual report indicates that its facilities are valued at approximately $21 billion. In addition, according to the Postal Service, it paid approximately $860 million for capital projects and maintenance repairs in fiscal year 2006. About three-fourths of postal facilities are leased, and in fiscal year 2006, the Postal Service paid over $1 billion to lease these facilities. The Postal Service is responsible for maintaining all of its owned facilities and many of its leased facilities, but maintenance responsibilities vary with the specific lease and can change when a lease is renegotiated. Employees at postal retail facilities provide services related to First-Class Mail, Insured and Registered Mail, Parcel Post, Priority Mail, and other services, such as post office box rentals and money-order purchases. Some retail facilities also provide space for other functions, such as receiving and sorting mail for delivery. Retail facilities—whether owned or leased— fall into one of three categories: (1) main post offices, where local postmasters oversee retail operations in the geographic area; (2) postal stations located within a municipality’s corporate limits; and (3) postal branches located outside a municipality’s corporate limits. According to Postal Service data, main post offices account for almost 75 percent of all retail facilities, but in large communities there may be more stations and branches. The Postal Service also operates nonretail facilities, such as mail processing facilities, vehicle maintenance facilities, and administrative offices. Figure 1 provides information on the different types of postal facilities. Besides the retail facilities it owns or leases, the Postal Service reported in its 2006 annual report that it operates about 3,950 privately owned and operated facilities, known as either “contract postal units” or “community post offices,” which provide retail postal services. Contract postal units are operated by nonpostal employees in privately operated businesses, such as convenience stores, grocery stores, greeting card stores, and pharmacies. Community post offices are contract postal units that are located in small communities and function as main post offices. The Postal Service reported that there were 3,014 contract postal units and 937 community post offices throughout the nation. The Postal Service has no responsibility for maintaining these privately operated retail facilities. Responsibility for managing postal facilities is distributed across the Postal Service. Three Postal Service departments in headquarters share responsibility for managing data on postal facilities—(1) Delivery and Retail, (2) Facilities, and (3) Intelligent Mail and Address Quality. Each of these departments tracks different data on postal facilities depending on its needs. Delivery and Retail manages FDB, which was developed to consolidate information on all postal facilities. Facilities manages the Facility Management System, which is used to manage facility acquisitions and capital and expense projects. Intelligent Mail and Address Quality administers the Address Management System, which contains the addresses of about 160 million delivery locations nationwide, including postal facilities. Both of these systems feed information directly into FDB. The Postal Service’s Vice President for Facilities oversees the maintenance of facilities nationwide in conjunction with eight regionally based Facilities Service Offices, which manage the maintenance activities in the Postal Service’s areas. The Postal Service’s Vice President for Delivery and Retail—in conjunction with the nine area vice presidents, 80 district managers, and almost 24,000 local postmasters throughout the country—has nationwide responsibility for aligning the Postal Service’s retail network with customer needs (see fig. 2). The district managers are responsible for making recommendations to open or close a postal retail facility, while the Vice President for Delivery and Retail is responsible for acting on the recommendations. In 2001, we placed the Postal Service on our list of agencies and programs designated as high risk due to, among other factors, financial and operational challenges. The Postal Service responded by issuing a plan to “transform” its operations—the 2002 Transformation Plan. Specific strategies outlined in the plan called for the Postal Service to align its retail network with customer needs by promoting alternative access to retail services and closing “low-value, redundant” postal retail facilities in overserved areas. To obtain information needed to align access to retail services with customer needs, the Postal Service indicated that it would establish a national facility database and develop a criteria-based methodology to determine which facilities to close. The criteria were to include factors, such as a facility’s proximity to other postal facilities, the number of households and delivery points in a community, and indicators of retail productivity. In 2004, we reported that the Postal Service had not yet developed criteria for making changes to its retail facility network, including facility closures and consolidations. The Postal Service updated its Transformation Plan in 2005 for fiscal years 2006 through 2010, indicating that it intended to reduce its long-term facility repair costs by doing more focused, routine facility assessments and preventive maintenance. The postal reform legislation enacted in December 2006 provided additional opportunities to address the challenges the Postal Service faces in adapting to an increasingly competitive environment. The act provides tools and mechanisms to help control costs, including the costs of aligning its facility network with its customer needs. The act also requires the Postal Service to develop a plan by June 2008 to “rationalize” its network of facilities, remove excess capacity from the network, and identify anticipated cost savings and other benefits associated with network rationalization. In 2007, we removed the Postal Service’s high-risk designation because the Postal Service addressed several concerns we raised when we originally placed the Postal Service on the high-risk list in 2001 and because of the passage of postal reform legislation. Developed in 2003, FDB has not achieved the Postal Service’s anticipated goal or conformed to a leading federal practice that calls for a consolidated source of accurate facility data because the data entered into FDB are not reliable. As a result, the Postal Service indicated that several major Postal Service departments do not use FDB for aggregate facility information, partly because of concerns about its reliability. These concerns result from, among other things, inaccurate data entered into the systems that feed into FDB, problems with how the systems are linked to form an FDB facility entry, and mistakes in entering data directly into FDB. The Postal Service has taken steps to improve the database, but systemic problems remain. In addition, FDB does not meet leading federal practices for tracking facility management performance and trends because FDB does not include facility management performance measures or provide for tracking trends over time. While the Postal Service created FDB in 2003 to achieve its goal for a consolidated source of accurate facility data, it has not achieved that goal due to data reliability problems. According to the Postal Service, it established FDB because its prior use of multiple databases caused confusion, data inaccuracies, problems in decision making, and higher costs. However, based on our analysis of selected data fields, FDB data problems make it unreliable as a centralized source of aggregate facility data even after performing data-cleaning techniques on the raw data. Specifically, our assessment revealed the following nationwide problems with the data’s reliability as of October 5, 2006: 145 facility entries were exact duplicates of another facility entry (all data fields were the same); 1,931 facility entries had multiple retail facilities listed at the same address (e.g., a main post office and a station were listed with the same address); 1,288 facility entries had different amounts of square footage listed for the 892 facility entries had conflicting information on whether the facility is 1,216 facility entries had conflicting data on the amount of the facility’s 509 facility entries listed as having staffed more retail windows than reportedly exist at the facility. The Lubbock (Texas) Main Post Office illustrates several of the data reliability problems we found. Specifically, in FDB data reported as of July 2007, the main post office is listed four times—each with different (1) square footage amounts, (2) ownership information, and (3) lease payment amounts. Except for information on the annual rent—which the Postal Service considers sensitive—table 1 displays these FDB fields for the Lubbock Main Post Office. We discussed several specific examples of the data reliability problems we found with postal officials who, after researching multiple data sources, provided explanations for the specific examples we found. For example, with respect to the Lubbock Main Post Office, postal officials said that the first entry in table 1 is correct while the other three entries actually represent other postal facilities at different locations in Lubbock. In addition, using another data source, they told us that entry 2 is actually a carrier annex; entry 3 is a warehouse; and entry 4 is a postal vending machine. Using other data sources, the Postal Service officials also provided explanations for other specific problems we identified. However, without additional site visits, we cannot determine whether the explanations provided were accurate. We also identified incorrect FDB information for 24 of the 58 postal facilities we visited. For example, during our sites visits, we found that information on vacant leasable square footage, which the Postal Service asks local employees to document, was inaccurate in FDB. At least six of the facilities we visited had vacant space that local employees said could be leased, but these facilities were not listed as having vacant, leasable space in FDB. These facilities and their vacant space are shown in figure 3. Postal officials acknowledged our examples and noted there are few incentives for local officials to report facilities’ vacant, leasable space in FDB. Postal officials acknowledged that the Postal Service has not analyzed the reliability of FDB data but expressed confidence that the problems we found affect a small percentage of the Postal Service’s facilities.