With technology morphing the way we live our lives at warp speed, it's no big surprise that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has decided to go high-tech with its compliance enforcement.
Currently, the odds of being hit with any substantive on-site compliance review are somewhere between slim and none. Because of lack of staffing and the cumbersome nature of plowing through mountains of paperwork, each year FMCSA officials are only able to conduct compliance reviews on less than 2 percent of the motor carriers in the U.S.
Enter the technology knight on a white horse – CSA 2010. Back in 2004, FMCSA officials started developing a data-drivensystem of analyzing all inspection reports on motor carriers and drivers to identify trends of noncompliance.
The mega database system, with all of its algorithms and programs, will spit out monthly safety ratings for companies. Those who crop up with numerous violations – ranging from the not-so-serious to out-of-service – will pop up on FMCSA'scompliance radar.
But that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get a full-blown on-site compliance review. Depending on the severity of the rating, you could get anything from a letter telling you to straighten up your act to that dreaded on-site review that likens to an IRS audit.
Companies will have a chance to get their act together and report back to FMCSA to keep a good safety fitness rating. There will be three fitness rating in the 2010 program: "unfit," "marginal" and "continue to operate."
The overall concept is simple enough but, as with anything, the devil is in the details – and with CSA 2010, there are a ton of details.
The program can be broken down into the data, the math behind the number, enforcement, safety fitness determinations and the possible hiccups motor carriers could encounter along the way.
The following is the first in a series of articles that will explain the ins and outs of the new enforcement program bearing down on the trucking industry.
It seems like nowadays, everywhere you turn, some group, business or government entity is collecting data on you.
Credit agencies record your every financial move. Grocery stores track your every purchase with their "shopper cards." And, now, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is going to collect every single mark made on inspection reports and from crash reports.
FMCSA will calculate safety performance of motor carriers – which includes owner-operators running under their own authority – based on seven Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories. Those seven categories, dubbed BASICs, and the federal regulations they relate to are:
* Controlled substances/alcohol (Parts 382 and 392);
* Vehicle Maintenance (Parts 393 and 396);
* Cargo related (Parts 392, 393, 397 and hazmat); and
FMCSA officials have assigned weighted values for various violations that may have noted on inspections or on crash reports. It important to note that these weighted values will then be time weighted, divided by relevant inspections and separated into peer groups.
That will determine a motor carrier's percentile ranking showing its compliance in a certain BASIC category. That percentile ranking will be the number that FMCSA is watching – not the individual weighted point totals – to determine if an intervention is in order.
Here's a sampling of some of the point values.
Motor carriers know that getting cited for having improper window tint isn't nearly as serious as falsifying logbooks and violating hours of service.
Fortunately, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials claim they understand that, and all inspection violations will not be treated as equal in the new CSA 2010 enforcement program.
Without getting into a bunch of computer or mathematical jargon, simply put, some violations will do more damage to a motor carrier's profile than others.
For example, old violations will not hurt your record as bad as newer ones. Violations shown to create a bigger risk of crash involvement will count heavier.
FMCSA also recognizes that even good companies may have an occasional horrible inspection. The data will be limited as to how much damage one poor inspection can do to a company's record.
The agency is also mindful of an inspection with a bunch of minor violations – like getting four window tint violations on one inspection, one for each window.
In cases like that, FMCSA officials have put a limit on the number of violations from the cited reg that will be counted against the company.
Owner-operators running under their own authority know that by nature they have fewer inspections every year than a mega carrier. And simple percentage math tells you that one marginal inspection out of a dozen is going to hurt a lot more than one marginal inspection out of a hundred.
That's another thing that FMCSA officials recognize. So, once all of the violations are weighted for severity and time, limited on repetitive violations and all of that, the end result for a motor carrier will be compared against motor carriers that are about the same size with the same number of inspections.
For the owner-operator, that means your level of compliance will be compared to other one-guy, one-truck or outfits that get inspected about as often as you do.
In the end, FMCSA officials set up the system so it will give a good snapshot of overall compliance when compared to similar motor carriers.
You could probably flip a coin to decide which scares a motor carrier more – a full-blown, on-site compliance review or an IRS audit.
Neither one is a pleasant experience. They are both lengthy, burdensome processes.
The on-site compliance review – currently pretty much FMCSA's only tool in its enforcement arsenal – is such an involved process that with current staffing levels, fewer than 2 percent of the motor carriers in the country are audited each year.
That too will change with the launch of CSA 2010.
After all of the violations are entered, chewed up and spit out of the CSA 2010 Safety Management System, motor carriers will be rated in all of the BASIC compliance areas. The higher the ranking percentile, the more noncompliant the motor carrier. These rankings will be updated on a continual basis.
Those rankings will help FMCSA enforcement personnel determine what method of enforcement – now called interventions – to pick. Enforcement will no longer be a one-size-fits-all scenario.
Enforcement can be triggered by:
Motor carriers know the value of the current "satisfactory" safety rating. Customers get itchy when they see a "conditional" or "unsatisfactory" rating.
While the names will change, the meaning will pretty much remain the same. Under CSA 2010, motor carriers will be ranked by "continue to operate," "marginal" and "unfit."
The big change on this from the current enforcement scheme is that right now safety fitness determination is assigned following compliance reviews. FMCSA is planning to issue a rulemaking that will change all of that.
Where the current method relies heavily on critical and acute violations and required deficiencies in multiple areas, the new method will arrive at a safety fitness determination using all the data collected – including from roadside inspections.
It's FMCSA's intent for the new process to be a reflection of the motor carrier's current compliance, and not how the motor carrier fared in compliance reviews months or even years before.
The new compliance enforcement program put together by FMCSA is clever in its concept that enforcement will be triggered by performance.
The way data is handled and considered, it weights behaviors that pose the greatest risks to truckers and highway safety. Ultimately, it's about reducing the number of big truck-related injuries and fatalities even more.
The linchpin of the entire system is the data. And that is the one area raising the most concern at the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association.
The data is going to include all violations noted on inspection reports and crash reports.
The information entered is not limited to just convictions. Citations and warnings – as long as they are noted on the inspection reports – will all be included in the database and calculated to figure the safety rating.
Tickets that are not included on an inspection report, however, will not be entered into the CSA 2010 database.
It is a lot of data. The carrier portion of the database will carry 24 months of inspections and crash reports. The driver profiles will contain 36 months of data.
By FMCSA's math, the two databases contain 690,000 motor carrier profiles and 3.6 million driver profiles with data from approximately 26.2 million inspections and 730,000 crash records.
Factor in the fact that all of that data is coming in from law enforcement agencies from all around the country in states with different reporting procedures and one can't help but wonder how accurate all of that data can be.
FMCSA has been working closely with states since 2004 to shore up reporting of violations. In 2004, fewer than half of the states and DC were classified as being "good" or "green" states. A total of 14 states were rated "poor" or "red" states.
In five years, 32 states are now classified as good. But 14 remain in the fair category, with five still languishing in the poor category.
Drawing from an old computer adage – garbage in, garbage out. If the data is not entered properly or not entered at all, it seems inevitable that motor carrier and driver compliance records may not be completely accurate.
Currently, motor carriers can challenge information contained in their safety profiles through a system called Data Qs. However, most of the time, carriers find that challenging data raely results in the error being corrected. most of the time, carriers find that challenging data rarely results in the error being corrected.
It also seems that motor carriers and drivers are being treated significantly different. For starters, motor carriers only have to worry about two years worth of data. Drivers will lug around three years of inspection violations and crash reports following them around.