The Department of Transportation has agreed to audit the Federal Motor Carrier Administration Administration’s (FMCSA) Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) system after concerns were raised by legislators.
After hearing concerns in a House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit hearing, the committee’s chairman and its ranking member requested the audit. The CSA program, which uses seven measurement categories to score a motor carrier’s safety record, is under fire for questionable methodology.
Committee Chairman John L. Mica (R-FL) and Rep. Nick J. Rahall (D-W.VA) penned a letter to Inspector General Calvin L. Scovel III of the Department of Transportation expressing concerns that “a lack of adequate safety data, inappropriate weighting of violations, and other scoring problems are causing CSA to erroneously label carrier safety performance.”
Because CSA scores are public, the congressmen are also concerned that “third parties that utilize CSA scores to evaluate carriers may be making ill-guided safety-based decisions.”
Some other questions were raised in the letter, including:
– In each BASIC, please characterize the relationship between scores and future crash risk.
– Are carriers’ scores impacted by jurisdictional and regional disparities in enforcement practices?
– Has FMCSA been transparent with respect to the data on which violation severity weights are based?
– How effective has FMCSA been in working with the States to properly implement CSA?
No timeline has been set on the audit.