FMCSA Revises Streamlining Proposal for Motor Carrier Registration Process

This story appears in the Nov. 7 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has issued a revised proposal to streamline the agency’s registration process for motor carriers, brokers and freight forwarders — and eventually help the agency identify so-called “chameleon” operators.

The 90-page supplemental proposed rule announced last month would add to a 2005 proposal that never went into effect. It will combine the Department of Transportation’s identification number system, the single-state registration system and a financial responsibility system into a single online federal system and raise the fee to $300 from $200.

The new system, mandated by Congress in 1995, will “consolidate and simplify” current registration processes and increase public accessibility to data about motor carriers and motor coach companies, FMCSA said.

Most new carriers will pay a $300 fee to register, but the system is “separate and apart” from the Unified Carrier Registration program that collects fees from interstate carriers, brokers and freight forwarders to pay for motor carrier enforcement programs, said Bob Pitcher, vice president of state laws for American Trucking Associations.

In a speech last month at ATA’s Management Conference & Exhibition, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said the new system will offer the agency better vetting tools to red-flag motor carriers known as “chameleons” — carriers that have their operating authority revoked, only to reemerge with a different name.

“We’ve got to make sure that folks who are operating in the industry are maintaining high standards and stay there,” Ferro told ATA’s safety policy committee on Oct. 16.

Ferro said the new system, which has been tested the past two years, ultimately will help the agency, trucking industry and law enforcement “make sure we can identify the folks who shouldn’t be behind the wheel, that we can identify the equipment that shouldn’t be on the road and that we can identify the carriers who have no business being motor carriers.”

“Or use those identification tools to help remediate or help them improve,” Ferro added.

Pitcher said the agency holds out “high hopes” that the new registration system will keep bad operators off the nation’s highways.

“Presumably this system, when they get it going some time from now, will improve the data and enable them to track those kinds of carriers a little bit more easily than they can now,” Pitcher said.

But Pitcher said for now the streamlined system will mostly aid FMCSA in gaining some internal operating efficiencies. “I don’t know that the outer world is going to see much change,” Pitcher said.

Pitcher said ATA had two problems with an earlier URS proposal in 2005 — one that called for a carrier to re-register whenever it had a change of ownership. That requirement was dropped in the new proposal, Pitcher said.

The other problem was that the application itself was 19 pages long with 14 pages of instructions.

FMCSA agreed the application needed to be revised and simplified, but the new form is 30 pages long with 20 pages of instruction, Pitcher said.

“We thought that in general combining registrations is a good idea but the form was going to be very unwieldy for carriers and probably confusing,” Pitcher said.

The registration proposal also calls for all filing to be done electronically.

“The Agency believes mandatory electronic filing is feasible and would result in substantial cost savings to both filers and FMCSA,” FMCSA said. “Currently, an estimated 88% of motor carriers in the United States have Internet access, and this number is steadily growing. Furthermore, the Internet is publicly accessible via libraries and other public facilities. Electronic filing is cost effective and would incorporate automated error checking, reduce processing time, and facilitate faster issuance of USDOT numbers.”