By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter This story appears in the Dec. 13 print edition of Transport Topics.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has issued new rules that will require brokers working with household goods movers to provide more information to consumers.
The bulk of the regulation, which FMCSA said will force brokers to “comply with certain consumer protection requirements,” goes into effect Jan. 28.
Those protection requirements include that brokers provide movers’ U.S. Department of Transportation numbers on their ads and websites, publish estimates of expected moving and brokerage fees and provide FMCSA published information about consumer rights, and policies for deposits, cancellations and refunds.
Brokers also will be allowed only to provide estimates from authorized carriers, must physically survey shipments within 50 miles of either the mover or broker, and can only use the names and logos of FMCSA-authorized movers with which the broker has existing agreements.
“This rulemaking is intended to ensure that individual shippers who arrange for transportation of household goods through brokers receive necessary information regarding their rights and responsibilities in connection with interstate household goods moves,” FMCSA said.
FMCSA also stated that brokers of household goods movements will need to increase their surety bonds to $25,000 from $10,000 beginning in 2012.
In its Federal Register notice, FMCSA said the final rule was the result of both a 2003 petition from the American Moving and Storage Association and a congressional directive in the 2005 highway reauthorization.
“Until now, brokers have not been subject to the same consumer protection requirements as licensed interstate movers,” Linda Bauer Darr, American Moving and Storage Association president, said in a statement. “Few, if any, consumers understood the distinction between brokers and carriers, leaving them feeling cheated of their rights.”
The new regulations, Darr said, close “a loophole that too many of these middlemen have been exploiting for years.”
“In some cases, brokers connected consumers with fly-by-night rogue operators, posing as movers, and were ripped off,” Darr said.
Robert Voltmann, president of the Transportation Intermediaries Association, said the regulations were “very fair.”
“It is such a specialized niche within the market, and it is such an emotional niche within the market, that I thought the agency did as good a job as they possibly could in walking a fine line between all of the competing interests to reach a fair conclusion,” he said.
