No notification of parcel received until the parcel was being returned to sender

My daughter was receiving her transcripts from a school in the US. We only received a note in our post box on Friday 2nd March saying that there was a parcel waiting for us. Given the data on the note I decided to track it on the SA Post Office website. According the the website, on 27th February the parcel was being returned to sender in the US. How is this possible when we only received our first notification on 2nd March. According to the website the parcel was received on 30th November at the post office. How is it that no notification was received for 3 months? We paid to have the transcripts issued and this is totally unacceptable.