Update on the CSA Program, June 30, 2017

One of the tools QualifiedCarriers.com provides clients, is the ability to set your own thresholds for a variety of motor carrier safety and/or compliance data, with FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety and Accountability (“CSA”). Congress commissioned The National Academy of Sciences (“NAS”) to conduct a comprehensive review of the CSA program to test the validity of the system and the impact of its scores on the public who might consider using them. The NAS has completed its review. We’ll highlight some of the findings.

The program was found to be “structured in a reasonable way,” that it has sound reason behind the method of identifying motor carriers with a certain alert status, but that it should be done by a more statistical, measurable, principled approach. NAS took issue with FMCSA’s use of experts instead of relying on data.

The NAS did not make a recommendation as to whether SMS results and scores should be available to the public. However, the NAS recommends that the Agency conduct a detailed review and analysis of the potential impacts that those scores will have on the industry and the public if they are made readily available. With this said, CSA’s percentile scores may be hidden while that impact study is performed.

NAS recommended multiple quality and transparency improvements be made by FMCSA. Specifically, CSA should be a system that relies more upon data than selected expert opinion; FMCSA should embrace transparency so data quality can be tested and improved; NAS supports the direct estimation of variability in scores and rankings; all of which should allow FMCSA to better adapt to changes in the future. Additionally, NAS encouraged FMCSA to collaborate closely with state law enforcement to improve data quality and to implement a National Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria—something some in FMCSA and safety advocates have been loath to accept.

NAS provided additional advice to FMCSA, suggesting it consider evaluating both percentile ranks and absolute measures, when making decisions regarding whether to issue a carrier an SMS alert. Presumably, NAS recognized that forcing a percentile number, is akin to grading on a curve. Considering both absolute and percentile scores allows law enforcement to have a bigger, better picture.

Finally, NAS’ review contained one already new and controversial suggestion. NAS, wrote of its desire to see FMCSA collect more operational and financial information on carriers, including compensation style and data, driver turnover and other data that might provide more complexion. The controversy lies in the compensation piece. Ironically, while NAS suggests FMCSA rely more upon data than expert, it ran afoul of its own advice when it referenced an expert opinion that salary drivers are “known to be” safer than drivers paid on a mileage basis. No comprehensive or definitive study on this exists.

We continue to watch this carefully, and will keep our clients posted as to future events. QualifiedCarriers.com provides daily and periodic updates on the quality of data for your carriers, and, if subscribed, keeps your documents and insurance certificates updated. We have many tools to assist you in evaluating your carriers.

Jeff Tucker Among Industry Stakeholders to Commend GAO Report

QualifiedCarriers.com Co-Founder Jeff Tucker and other industry stakeholders recently endorsed the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) recommendations for "vigorous changes" to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to improve the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program.

Read Tucker's recommendations in the full article by Logistics Management:

Industry Stakeholders Commend GAO Report on CSA Scoring System

QUALIFIEDCARRIERS.COM LAUNCHES QUALIFIEDMARINETERMINALS.COM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

QUALIFIEDCARRIERS.COM LAUNCHES QUALIFIEDMARINETERMINALS.COM

Cherry Hill, NJ USA, February 18, 2013

QualifedCarriers.com CEO Jeff Tucker is pleased to announce the launch of QualifiedMarineTerminals.com.

As the petro-chemical industry seeks to reduce spills, accidents, losses and other risks, the industry is moving toward a more comprehensive and global standard for screening, selecting, and monitoring marine terminals for compliance, safety, and security.  To assist this effort, QualifiedCarriers.com has launched a Web-based risk management toolbox specifically designed for managing marine terminal risk.  The Web site, QualifiedMarineTerminals.com, provides users with platforms for measuring compliance against industry standards, performing marine terminal self-assessments and on-site audits, and launching and tracking corrective and preventive action (CAPA) .  The system comes complete with secure document management, task scheduling functions, and a variety of related tools.

A major oil exploration, refining retailer, and long-time subscriber to QualifiedCarriers.com, approached QualifiedCarriers in early 2011, seeking a solution for growing marine terminal risk.  The client had been relying on QualifedCarriers.com for years as a Web-based toolbox for managing risk associated with hiring motor carriers.  Seeking a similar solution for marine terminal risk, the client naturally turned to QualifiedCarriers.

QualifiedCarriers.com is the nation’s most comprehensive USDOT data reporting and compliance toolbox for shippers. Among other things, we offer secure document management for key carrier documents, plus e-mail alerts when urgent changes occur to a carrier’s FMCSA status (e.g., authority, safety rating). We are the only firm of this type founded and managed by professional risk managers.  Our clients benefit from our knowledge and involvement of matters occurring in Washington, at FMCSA, PHMSA, and on Capitol Hill. Our Co-founder, Jeff Tucker has chaired the TIA Carrier Selection Framework Committee since 2006, is a member of the FMCSA MCSAC CSA Subcommittee, and has testified on CSA before Congress.

Contact: Jeff Tucker, CEO; jeff.tucker@qualifiedcarriers.com ; 856-773-9325 ext. 122; mobile: 856-498-5361 ###

QualifiedCarriers.com | 900 Dudley Ave, Suite 250, Cherry Hill, NJ 08002 | 856.773.9325

Safety Ratings Changing More Rapidy Under CSA

FMCSA’s use of targeted interventions, where they’ll spend one day, instead of 4 to 6, with a carrier, are enabling FMCSA to reach more carriers, quicker. CSA is helping them prioritize their resources.

Shippers need to know when one of their carriers shifts to “Conditional” or “Unsatisfactory.” In just over a year the number of carriers rated “Conditional” jumped by an unprecedented 1,156, and the number of satisfactory carriers dropped by 739. Well over 100 trucking companies per month are downgraded. A tool like QualifiedCarriers.com can notify you when it happens, with an email alert.

QualifiedCarriers.com General Manager Joins

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, a nonprofit organization, of federal, state, government agencies and private industry, dedicated to improving commercial vehicle safety. CVSA assembled a “CSA Stakeholders Committee,” consisting of various trade associations of carriers, brokers, shippers, and law enforcement officials, with the purpose of speaking to FMCSA in a unified, respectful and objective voice, to provide feedback on how to improve CSA.

 QualifiedCarriers.com’s General Manager, Darin Day, Esq., is one of only three stand-alone company members of the committee, which consists mainly of trade association members. Darin understands the law, and FMCSA’s recent policy shifts, making him the perfect candidate to influence positive change. We’re honored to be among such a distinguished group of subject matter experts, advocating for safety, and fairness in FMCSA data reporting.

FMCSA Ignores Calls to Improve Highway Safety Today

QualifiedCarriers.com, TIA and other industry have asked FMCSA to address these needs each of these enhancements are simple data pushes. FMCSA has the data, and must share it through its public data files. Unlike the ambiguity of CSA, these items will have an immediate and positive impact on highway safety. Plus, this is what shippers and brokers really need to know. Even FMCSA doesn’t know what a 62 BASIC score means to a carrier’s safety fitness, but everybody knows that it’s business suicide to use a carrier who has been placed out of service. FMCSA has not responded to the following requests for months, yet they push CSA.

 1. FMCSA does not have the regulatory authority to revoke the authority of new carriers who they place out of service (OOS)! Yet they don’t send that data to the public in one of their downloadable files, so brokers and shippers can use it in their risk or operating systems.

2. FMCSA does not have regulatory authority to revoke the  operating authority of carriers with whom they enter a negotiated settlement to correct deficiencies, and the carrier fails to rectify them. FMCSA places the carrier OOS, yet they don’t send that data to the public in one of their downloadable files, so brokers and shippers can use it in their risk or operating systems.

3. When a carrier fails its compliance review, it receives an “Unsatisfactory” safety rating. FMCSA does have the authority to revoke that carrier’s operating authority, but due to the fact that one department has to email an OOS message to another department, email sometimes fails, and the carrier remains operating for months, even years. We asked FMCSA to publish the OOS, so if any email doesn’t go through, at least the public picks up on the OOS, and avoids using such a carrier.

4. By law, FMCSA is required to maintain a “high risk carrier” database and report to Congress what it’s doing about it. FMCSA plans to replace safety rating, with safety fitness determination (SFD) in a year or two. When they do, there is widespread speculation that those high risk carriers will have SFD’s equivalent “unsafe” rating. We have asked FMCSA to post all of the high risk carriers daily, to one of its several publicly available data files, so that industry can make swift use of that data, and stop using those carriers.

5. FMCSA and PHMSA have no way of talking or synchronizing their data. FMCSA does not know what carriers have hazmat certificates! PHMSA, the agency that issues the hazmat certificates, has a database that they, themselves, can’t validate, due to high number of errors. Neither shippers nor brokers nor the DOT itself can validate which carriers have a valid hazmat certificate! Yet, FMCSA plans to introduce a new hazmat BASIC score, essentially guessing who the hazmat carriers are, and reporting on them.

We invite letters and emails to be sent to FMCSA Administrator Ferro (anne.ferro@dot.gov) asking her to focus on the real issues that shippers and brokers care about, and leave CSA to her own use

FMCSA Drafts Shipper & Broker Guidelines Nobody Wanted

Despite warnings, requests and pleading by shipper and broker groups to the contrary, FMCSA forged ahead with guidance documents for “shippers, brokers and insurance companies” to use CSA scores in their carrier selection decision making. When word of the potential of these documents was learned, QualifiedCarriers.com, and the largest broker and shipper trade associations, TIA and National Industrial Transportation League (“NITL”) set an appointment with FMCSA, to stop, shelve, delay, or at least thoughtfully draft such a document, to avoid catastrophic consequences from misuse. FMCSA agreed at least twice, in public forums, it would talk with industry to hear its concerns before publishing.

So we were shocked when FMCSA published its documents one week before that meeting was to take place! Not only were shippers and brokers blindsided, but the documents published by FMCSA contained errors and misstatements. Another document falsely stated that FMCSA held “listening sessions with TIA and NITL,” and that the documents were in response to their requests—patently untrue.

CSA is very early into the first of two phases. It’s a young program that does not arrive at a safety rating, or safety fitness determination. It needs time to fill in enormous gaps in the data. Its methodology must mature and the agency must complete its most important, phase two. At that point, it will decide how the data may be combined, and used to determine a carrier’s safety fitness. This might happen in 2014. So, if FMCSA itself hasn’t figured out how to use BASIC scores to measure safety fitness, however could a shipper or broker?

We hope FMCSA begins to describes the CSA system appropriately, as a new system with a lot of promise, that it and its law enforcement colleagues use internally, to prioritize their resources, and leave shippers and brokers out of it.

ADVOCACY: QualifiedCarriers.com Founder Testifies Before Congress

Our co-founder and CEO Jeff Tucker testified in Congress July 11, before the House of Representatives Small Business Committee, on the harm FMCSA is causing to small business. In May 2012, despite several meetings and discussions where shipper and broker groups pleaded with FMCSA executive staff, FMCSA shocked and disappointed shippers and brokers by publishing three (3) documents intended to guide shippers and brokers on how to use CSA/BASICs to select carriers. Worse, the documents contain many misleading and false statements.  By doing so, they have given accident lawyers jet fuel for their lawsuits against shippers and brokers who hire carriers. Meanwhile, they have ignored simple solutions to share with the public their worst of the worst carriers, their “high risk” carriers.

Under Federal law, FMCSA has one determination of a carrier’s fitness—safety rating. BASICS are not safety ratings. They may one day be the building blocks of a future safety rating (safety fitness determination), but they are not so today. Today, 2/7 of BASICs are hidden by FMCSA, and 2/3 of all carriers don’t even have one BASIC score at all—18 months into CSA! Two recent studies conclude there is no correlation to crash risk for any BASIC.  

The House Small Business Committee members took the issue seriously, and took FMCSA to task for several key items. Of significant concern, were: (a) FMCSA’s 2 year refusal to release the study that shows accidents not the fault of the truck drivers still correlate to truck driver accidents; (b) that FMCSA would presume a trucker guilty in 100% accidents; (c) 2 studies show CSA BASICs don’t correlate to crash.  We will keep up the fight. We’re hoping for a more receptive FMCSA in the future.