FMCSA Criticizes GAO Study on CSA

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A Government Accountability Office study that was critical of the way federal regulators identify crash-prone carriers is the result of a “philosophical disagreement” between regulators and GAO investigators, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials said.

The GAO study, released earlier this month, said FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability data are not good predictors of crash risk because most regulations used to calculate a carrier’s safety score are “not violated often enough to strongly associate them with crash risk for individual carriers.”

The GAO study concluded that the CSA safety measurement system that rates motor carriers on a curve should be revised in part because of limits on access to needed data.

At a Feb. 12 presentation to the FMCSA’s advisory CSA subcommittee, agency officials attempted to poke holes in the GAO study, saying that GAO’s recommendations would effectively eliminate 90% of the carriers from federal regulation.

“What the GAO focused on is that a carrier should have 20-plus inspections before we make an observation,” said Joe DeLorenzo, director of FMCSA’s office of enforcement and compliance. “That being said, we all realize that more data is better. That’s not the reality of what we’re dealing with.”

Since 90% of carriers do not receive 20 or more inspections, only 10% of the 500,000-plus active carriers would show up on the agency’s regulatory radar, DeLorenzo said.

The GAO study also found that FMCSA identified many carriers as high risk that were not later involved in a crash, potentially causing FMCSA to miss opportunities to intervene with carriers that were involved in crashes.

“What we have always said, and what we’ve done at our house, is that we never really focus on individual crashes. We look at groups of violations and patterns of violations to determine whether a carrier has a high crash risk,” DeLorenzo said. “We don’t want to wait until there is a crash.”