The Government Accountability Office has weighed in on the The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability) safety enforcement program. 

The ATA (American Trucking Association) seems to feel that the GAO discoveries reinforce the complaints that they have been screaming about for some time now.   I think the ATA likes the findings primarily because they think it will help their efforts to have the SMS scores removed for the public's eye.   I don't think that will ever happen.  

I think these finding may lead to some other long term changes. So , let's review.

While acknowledging some of the accomplishments of the program, the GAO primarily made a few points that I feel are worth discussing.

• First, the regulations the agency uses to calculate safety scores are not violated often enough to strongly associate them with crash risk for individual carriers.
• Second, there is not enough data to reliably compare most carriers’ performance with their peers.

I think they are suggesting that it is critical to make sure the scores are a statistically valid indicator of the carrier's risk. They specifically point out that the size or the number of power units within an operation and the frequency of inspection may be creating some disparity in SMS scores.   Some smaller trucking companies have little to no data and they don't get inspected enough to collect enough data to validate an accurate score.

One solution they suggested, that I don't think the FMCSA will adopt, is to only show a score for the trucking carriers that have more inspection and compliance data.  This means fewer carriers would have SMS scores.  So I don't see the FMCSA going this route even if it did make the existing scores more comparable or a better prediction of risk.  

FMCSA had “significant and substantive disagreements” with the GAO during the drafting of their report.  What basically came of the report is that the GAO told the agency to have a formal review on the scoring methodology and consider revising before adding to the system.

Here are a few of my concerns that we will be discussing here on our trucking insurance and transportation blog.

• What the future holds for the frequency of trucking inspections
• Impacts trucking carriers can expect if safety concerns aren't addressed
• How far will the "models" go to predict the risk 
• The future of Telematics
• Impact of SMS scores on insurance premiums

Love to hear your comments or suggestions for future posts.