Independent owner-operator Martin Jez, based in Galt, Calif., in anticipation of a slow period for flatbed, considered leasing to a carrier last year.
Recruiters repeatedly told him that his Pre-Employment Screening Program report was problematic. One carrier told him his Compliance Safety Accountability score was in the neighborhood of 300, and he was denied a lease because of it. His business partner – and wife – subsequently obtained a copy of his PSP report and had “no idea how they got the score number,” she says.
Jez didn’t either. Their one-unit A.M. Jez Trucking had suffered only a single out-of-service incident, and its carrier profile in the CSA Safety Measurement System showed no percentile ranking (or “score”) in any of the five public Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs). As of press time, in fact, it showed only four inspections and no crashes.
Where did the score come from?
That’s an increasingly common question with an often complex answer. It can be explained by seeing how carrier recruiting and qualifying procedures have changed since the advent of CSA and the related PSP program in 2010.
FMCSA has pounded with official gusto on the fact that drivers have no public “scores,” ever since plans to release Driver Safety Measurement System numbers hit the wall of consumer privacy law in the program’s infancy. Nevertheless, third-party services since have made an effort to outsource the computational work and approximate such rankings to give carriers a way to rank the CSA performance of their drivers. One company even has taken such a service straight to drivers themselves.
