Transportation Intermediaries Association says truck safety scores on FMCSA website have led to misuse in lawsuits.
The Transportation Intermediaries Association’s board has voted in favor of changing its policy concerning the public availability of data generated by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) initiative.
TIA joins with other industry stakeholders in urging FMCSA to immediately remove CSA scores from public view.
FMCSA’s start of CSA in December 2010 included assurances of a rulemaking to link CSA scores with a carrier’s safety rating through a Safety Fitness Determination (SFD).
“Since then, it has been confirmed by multiple sources both inside and outside the federal government, including the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General’s Office, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), that CSA is plagued with serious data flaws,” TIA said in a statement.
GAO has found the CSA program has helped FMCSA meet its safety objectives above the SafeStat program, which CSA replaced. However, the congressional watchdog agency said there remains significant concerns with CSA’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) score methodology, and the correlation between SMS scores and potential future crash risk.
GAO has recommended FMCSA revise its SMS methodology to at least account for limitations in available performance information and eliminate the use of safety event groups. The agency further noted states vary on inspection and enforcement, and data used to calculate violation rates is based on information that’s self-reported by the carrier.
TIA warned “CSA scores continue to be publicly available and, therefore, manipulated and misused in litigation and as tools for carrier selection, despite the explicit FMCSA website warning that CSA was designed and intended exclusively for agency and law enforcement use, and not for public consumption.” The group said the public availability of the CSA information has led to a “growing problem of negligent selection lawsuits.”
TIA Chairman Mr. Jeff Tucker commented on the TIA policy position:
Jeff Tucker, TIA chairman, said his members “want FMCSA to provide a highly reliable system to indicate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether or not to use a motor carrier… Today’s CSA is not only unreliable, but is proven useless for commercial carrier selection purposes. Worse yet, accident chasing lawyers have maligned CSA by misinterpreting scores in order to line their pockets, at the expense of good businesses.”
TIA wants CSA scores out of public view
