The scoring system used by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in its Compliance, Safety, Accountability system is flawed and is made up of an incomplete data set, concludes a Government Accountability Office report released Feb. 3. The GAO also concluded the program is particularly unfair for small carriers.
The GAO report, “Modifying the Compliance, Safety, Accountability Program Would Improve the Ability to Identify High Risk Carriers,” also recommends FMCSA change the system, due to various shortcomings the GAO found in its study, most of which stem from the quality of the data used by the agency to score carriers.
The GAO report’s findings are in line with Overdrive findings in spring of 2013, upon analyzing CSA data from its first two years in creating the CSA’s Data Trail site. Click here to see it.
Industry trade groups like the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and the American Trucking Associations — often loud critics of the agency’s carrier scoring program — both have expressed agreement with the study’s findings.
The GAO report, while seemingly a proponent of CSA’s mission of scoring carriers as an attempt to target unsafe ones, identifies several key problems with CSA and its Safety Measurement System scoring method. These problems “raise questions about whether SMS is effectively identifying carriers at highest risk for crashing in the future,” GAO’s report says.
The GAO study found that:
-The data being used to score carriers is inconsistent, due to variances in inspection and enforcement policies state to state.
