WASHINGTON — After years of complaints from truckers, brokers and insurance companies, federal regulators are standing up a team specifically to deal with rampant fraud in the trucking industry.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Registration Fraud Team will work in the agency’s registration office to focus solely on assisting those who have been victims of registration fraud at the agency as well as identifying measures to help prevent it.
“It’s a small team that doesn’t exist now, but we think it will go a long way towards helping the industry,” said Ken Riddle, director of FMCSA’s Office of Registration, during a presentation at FMCSA’s annual safety research forum on Wednesday.
“We’ve heard from every corner of the industry about how bad fraud is right now, and the one thing we’ve heard loud and clear is, ‘How can FMCSA help?’ We took that very seriously, so we’re looking at every way that we can help mitigate it.”
Scammers and hackers have been able to break into FMCSA’s registration system, which is used to provide motor carrier and broker operating authority, as well as certify insurance companies providing cargo and liability insurance. They register as fake drivers and fake companies. Such illegal access has led to motor carrier identity theft and can limit the ability of the FMCSA to effectively monitor safety.
Other short-term steps FMCSA has already taken or plans to take to address the problem is suspending online PIN requests that registrants use to access their accounts to update or make changes.
“We used to send those numbers online per request, but we can’t do that anymore because there was too much fraudulent activity with that,” Riddle said. “Now the only way to get a PIN number to access an account is to request it, and we will mail it to the address on file. It’s not convenient or expeditious, but it’s a small measure we took to help reduce the fraud.”
FMCSA has also moved to multifactor authentication for all IT systems that are accessed by the public, and is tightening measures for preventing principal places of business that are registered that do not meet regulatory requirements.
“This will help prevent some of these virtual, fraudulent, fake addresses that applicants are submitting for the sole purpose of committing fraud on the industry,” Riddle said.
Longer-term measures will include hiring outside contractors to provide both identity verification services and business verification services.
“We’re going to have the 800,000 existing registrants go through this identity verification process in order to weed out the bad actors that may already exist in the system,” he noted.
Both the immediate and longer-term changes will be incorporated into an overhauled registration system to replace the current Unified Registration System.
Last week FMCSA announced it will be asking the White House Office of Management and Budget to review and approve a request to collect new information that will be used to help set up the new system.
