Editorial: Controlling Reincarnated Carriers

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has taken a good step in its drive to control “reincarnated carriers,” troubled companies that essentially seek to shed their safety and compliance woes by repainting the company name on their vehicles.

FMCSA issued a proposed rulemaking on Nov. 12 that essentially would allow the agency to shut down any fleet that it finds has hired any key officer who has shown an “egregious disregard” for safety regulations at prior jobs.

The proposal would allow the agency to revoke the operating authority of any fleet that has as a controlling officer anyone who “engages, or has engaged, in a pattern or practice of avoiding regulatory compliance, masking noncompliance, while acting on behalf of any motor carrier.”

Controlling and eliminating these kinds of carriers, and eliminating those kinds of carrier executives, is a worthy goal that all should support.

But FMCSA’s task is not done with this proposal.

There are too many undefined or loosely defined elements in the proposal to allow the trucking industry to wholeheartedly support FMCSA’s plan.

The agency did the right thing some time back, when it asked the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee for its opinion on the proposed rule. The group — which is made up of representatives from involved parties, including industry, labor and law enforcement — liked the idea, but asked for some important changes.

Like ATA, the MCSAC representatives were concerned about how the agency was shifting onto fleets the requirement that they determine just who these known safety violators were.

Rather, MCSAC in June 2011 urged FMCSA to create a database of known offenders, which would allow carriers to screen the database before hiring anyone.

The agency did not include that database in its Nov. 12 plan.

FMCSA also needs to tell us all just what executive positions it feels would be covered by this rule. The rule is so vague as proposed that it’s possible an agency official could decide that a driver supervisor might be an important enough executive to close a carrier. We don’t think a driver supervisor is the kind of fleet executive the rule should be aimed at.

So, it’s important that carriers let FMCSA know through formal replies just what they think about the proposal by Jan. 13. We would urge fleets and related industry companies to encourage FMCSA to adopt the rule, but to make the definitions clearer and to agree to create the database of known offenders.