OIG Audit Identifies Nearly $9 Million In Unrecoverable, Unsupported Costs For Office Supplies Transactions

The Postal Service established the backdoor order entry process when it created the OfficeMax contract in January 2000. At that time, there were still a substantial number of offices without access to the Internet or the eBuy system. The backdoor process allowed these offices to mail, fax, or telephone orders to OfficeMax, who would enter the order into the system for processing and payment. Since there is no validation of purchase approval or independent certification of the invoice before payment, we identified $8,979,032 in unrecoverable unsupported questioned costs8 for the 163,446 backdoor transactions that occurred from July 2007 through June 2009