Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration enforcement chief Joe DeLorenzo said the agency so far has “felt good about how [off-site audits] have worked and how the agency was able to transition” quickly to those remote audits, somewhat out of necessity, when the pandemic hit. He spoke Wednesday at the agency’s 20th annual Analysis, Research, and Technology Forum, held virtually this year and broadcast live via Microsoft Teams.
DeLorenzo said it was a stroke of luck, too, that the agency was already planning to leverage off-site audits on a greater scale in carrier interventions in 2020. The year’s “blended approach,” he said, resulted in a roughly 50-50 split in off-site vs. on-site, in-person audits. The pandemic simply sped up the implementation of “where we were headed anyways." So far, “remote investigations do not hamper our ability to discover violations,” he said, and the agency has deemed the jump in off-site audits a success.
That shift, however, contrary to what some observers expected, might be more of a failure when measured by safety ratings issued.
Compared to 2019 levels, ratings of Satisfactory, Conditional or Unsatisfactory, considered together, were down on the whole by almost 40%, greatly accelerating the downward rating trend of the last several years.Data from FMCSA's Motor Carrier Management and Information System
Compared to the relatively modest fall in various focused and more comprehensive audits conducted, the huge fall in safety ratings suggests hesitancy on the part of federal and state auditors to depart too much from pre-pandemic procedure by issuing ratings as a result of a solely off-site investigation.
[Related: Owner-operators and small fleets remain in crosshairs of DOT’s offsite audits]
