USPS OIG Request Public Help In Catching Postal Employees Faking On the Job Injuries?

This is a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Ohio. The story is about an Ohio Postal Clerk’s conviction but check out the last paragraph.

Steven M. Dettelbach, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, today announced that on Friday, April 30, 2010, Tonia M. Anderson, 54, of Akron, Ohio, was convicted by a federal jury of four counts of mail fraud, eight counts of worker’s compensation fraud, and two counts of making false statements to federal officers. The jury returned a not guilty verdict as to one count of making false statements to federal officers. The guilty verdict was returned after a five day trial before U.S. District Judge Patricia A. Gaughan. The charge arose out of Anderson’s employment as a postal distribution clerk with the U.S. Postal Service and worker’s compensation payments Anderson received between August, 2005 and February, 2006.

The case was tried by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Teresa L. Dirksen and Phillip J. Tripi. The investigation preceding the indictment was jointly conducted by the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General and the Department of Labor Office of Inspector General.

Eastern Area Special Agent in Charge Elizabeth A. Farcht, U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General, stated: “The majority of U.S. Postal Service employees who collect federal workers’ compensation benefits have legitimate claims due to on the job injuries and are truly unable to perform any work. A small percentage, however, abuse the system and cost the Postal Service millions of dollars in fraudulent claims. This conviction should put those who choose to defraud the system on notice that our Special Agents with the USPS Office of Inspector General will aggressively investigate these cases, and present them to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for criminal prosecution when appropriate. You can also help by contacting the USPS Office of Inspector General at www.uspsoig.gov or 888-644-8398 if you know a postal employee who is faking an injury or defrauding the Postal Service.”

Sentencing for the defendant is scheduled for August 10, 2010, at 11:30 a.m.

11 thoughts on “USPS OIG Request Public Help In Catching Postal Employees Faking On the Job Injuries?

  1. Post Office Abuse is horrible and it seem as if everyone covers it up
    you could not beleive the type of things I have seen at 645 Wynn Drive Huntsville Alabama i have been reporting about this since 4-2008 and everyone just let their crimes go unpunished. management are the biggest liars ever and they are allowed to falsify documents i filed a workers comp complaint my station manager lied in her statement i was able to prove the lie and i have not been able to collect benifits I am entitled to to care for my family. its horrible how the worker has to wait years for any result and management results asap in their criminal acts
    i wonder if anyone will rescue the workers what happens when managment lies to worker comp to prevent benifits you are entitlted to they should go to jail for OWCP fraud too

  2. Where PMG POTTER, and HEADQUARTERS is getting their bogus numbers that they keep talking about at the HEARING UNDER OATH????? Sounds like fraud to me! Cooking the books, or changing color tags on the mail what ever it is that they want to call it.. and just who is potter really working for? because it’s not the USPS, If he had the best interest of the USPS he wouldn’t be trying to cut service to the public! hell is that not what our whole business is SERVICE!! Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?? Now he said 4 days to deliver the mail because Tuesday is also slow WHAT? Time to GO !

  3. They should also check OIG’s for faking being human. They are the Postal Service’s answer to Hitler’s SS.

  4. How about helping OIG catch redundant do nothing Supervisors/Managers and 204b`s that are getting paid to play on their computers and harass employees! Give them all a mail sack and tell them to hit the street a do a piece of a route!

  5. There are legitiimate cases of fraud out there. However, the vast majority of employees ae honest and carry their own integrity with honor. The same cannot be said of postal managemant. Supervisors, station managers, postmasters follow the postal regulations only when either they feel like it or when it benefits them. The overstaffing of management is at horrific proportions, management deleting workhours from employees paychecks is rampant, and use of postal credit cards and expense accounts is running wild. If the Inspection Service wants to crack down on internal crime let them look at these situations and protect the employees from, what has become, predatory management.
    The rampant disregard of postal regualtions and ehtics is destroying the integrity of the Service and disenfranchising the workers. Rules ar put in place to maintain order. The only order in place now is the union filing grievances to prevent the anarchy that management is creating. I shudder to think what the Postal Service would be like if the unions were not keeping management’s feet to the fire and protecting the standards that management is supposed to protect and does not!

  6. I knew a carrier who claimed she had a bad back and was on light duty but I saw her helping her husband move a ice box down 2 flights of stairs. her back seemed good to me at the time. of course it was a Sunday so maybe it didn’t bother her on Sundays

  7. I have reported information to the oig in the past, and it was ignored. There are a lot of fakers at the Indy plant. One of them was even hurt at an amusement park with a fellow employee, and this too, I reported. But no action. When the oig show that they are for real, people will assist, because they are sick of watching them sleep, and do nothing all of their 8 hours. Get real with it, and help will come!

  8. OIG, please quit picking on those that have legitimate injuries. I’m so tired of hearing people being called lame and lazy that I can hardly stand it. There are SO many more that are full timers that are NOT on an injured list that nobody watches! But those that are injured, a supervisor tries to tell them what they can and cant’ do. So, my question is if they have a medical degree and can diagnose injuries, what the heck are they doing here? A while ago, we had a mailhandler in our plant that racked up over $100,000 for a year; tons of overtime but no one could ever find him. He was hardly ever here. He’d punch in and either leave or go find a place to hide and apparantly was very good at it. Why aren’t you checking on people like that? The rest of us pick up the slack and never get thanked for doing so. We watch as others that know how to “get around” do absolutely nothing and get paid big bucks for it. We report to supervisors that he’d hiding out and nobody does a thing. This place is so upside down it’s just plain sad. It’s also time that the OIG really starts investigating upper management. Haven’t you noticed that they want to keep cutting the actual work force and yet new VP’s are named all the time? If we don’t have money to deliver the mail, how do we have money to pay more VP’s in DC? I don’t really think that OIG is really concerned. You seem to have your own agenda, just like the rest of the folks in DC. I hope you sleep well at night while the rest of us work our fingers off trying to make a living and keep food on the table and a roof over our heads.

  9. You should send some of your special agents to Piscataway P.O. plenty of fraud going on with union reps and the bums that they protect

  10. Are the inspectors so inept that they have to have others do their dirty work? I’ll answer that; YES THEY ARE. Even though during my post al career I was injured several times, I just worked through it. I just felt it was not worth the harrassment of filing a claim. My wife did, and our lives were hell for years because of it. Inspectors would sit outside our house for hours a day. Probably because some “good employee” claimed she was faking it. This is the way they operated in the Soviet Union. Spy and report to the state about your neighbors and even family members activity. We are getting closer to that system all the time.

Comments are closed.