The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on Friday at the Mid-America Trucking Show took a hard stance against freight fraud, framing it as a threat to the safety of the entire motoring public in a talk about their tech efforts to keep bad actors out of the agency's registration system.
FMCSA Deputy Chief Technology Officer Ankur Saini told the story of a driver on a "cold January night," running a regular haul on a regular route until "the calm of the night was broken" by another truck veering into his lane and, ultimately, ending the lives of both drivers. "An investigation ensued, the other company was operating without proper registration. It was similar to two or three other companies," and "the driver was recently put out of service because of a safety violation."
He then called fraud a "public safety crisis masquerading as an economic problem. ... A fraudulent motor carrier is 80% more likely to be involved in a crash. Fraud is a problem that impacts all of us because we share the road with all of those fraudulent entities."
With that, Saini began running down FMCSA's tech-driven efforts to prevent bad actors doing business under the cloak of legitimacy that FMCSA registration and operating authority provide. He called the efforts TotalShield. The problems he listed will be familiar to regular readers -- enforcement is fragmented with "50 states collecting data in different ways," building their own systems in line with their own state laws that were often "designed by people who never got to talk to each other."
The result is that "even when the intention to share data is there, it can be very hard to share data," he said. With just around 1,000 employees, Saini said FMCSA suffered from "limited resources," and had to lean heavily on technology to fight fraud.
The three-pronged approach of TotalShield looked to first better know the carrier population through improved data collection, then to modernize and consolidate the applications the industry interacts with, and finally to improve data sharing across the agency. It also included extensive attention to way to better protect the data of FMCSA-regulated entities.
Already, FMCSA has instituted multi-factor authentication in their online portal and begun to roll out early phases of their "one stop shop," the Motus system, announced by FMCSA Office of Registration Director Ken Riddle on Thursday at MATS.
[Related: Part of anti-fraud bid, FMCSA will launch 'Motus,' new 'one-stop shop' for all carrier business]
Riddle detailed the updated registration system he promised last year at MATS and has since spoken about at length during "stakeholder days," where FMCSA let carriers demo the system and give feedback. Riddle said the program is still on track, with some major tweaks driven by industry feedback.
He pointed users to resources on how to complete the new ID verification step and a resources hub, which details the coming changes to the program. FMCSA will have support staff for each step of the process, including a number to call (800-832-5660) and a website FAQ.
"We think that 99.9% of everybody will be able to pass" the new ID verification steps "if they are who they say they are, and pass it the first time at the kitchen table," said Riddle.
Overdrive had the chance to demo the ID verification system at MATS, and despite a few hiccups, got through the process on the second or third try in about 15 minutes. Riddle said FMCSA would "Roll out Motus in three steps," first by opening it up to supporting companies like industry service providers, financial companies like insurers or bond companies, as well as blanket companies. Then the system will open up for all users, and finally "step three is continuous feedback and improvement."
Riddle thanked Dale Prax, owner of the Freight Validate platform and FMCSA's "worst critic" for alerting him to the problem of carriers using false principal places of business to register fraudulent, or just sloppy, entities. Prax, in attendance at the talk, said Riddle seems to have almost entirely solved the problem now.
Riddle "had to back off," he said, some of the ambitious goals of the new registration system -- "improved PPOB verification" was not one of those areas, though.
In the question and answer session, several in the crowd expressed frustration with error messages and general dysfunction in FMCSA's online portals, and Saini responded that for the most part, these were "legacy systems" held up with "Band Aid" fixes. The new, modernized registration system would mostly solve those problems, and the legacy systems were mostly beyond fixing in that regard at this point, he said.
Other questions from the American Truckers group focused on foreign drivers with non-domiciled CDLs, also a hot topic at FMCSA Chief Counsel Jesse Elison's talk on Wednesday.
"They will not be able to pass the ID check," Riddle said of people in foreign countries trying to register with FMCSA. Riddle's office isn't directly in charge of the issue of non-domiciled CDLs nor English proficiency, but he said FMCSA leadership was on the case. "I’ll tell you I’ve heard a lot of conversation around those issues recently by our leadership and by department leadership and by other organizations," he said. "I think it will be addressed. That conversation is happening."
[Related: FMCSA Chief Counsel on deregulating trucking, English proficiency, non-domiciled CDLs]
