FMCSA Fails to Issue Maximum Fines For High-Risk Carriers, GAO Says
By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Sept. 24 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is doing a good job of targeting carriers that pose the highest risk of accidents, but fails to follow a 1999 law requiring that maximum fines be given to the most serious safety violators, a new government report said.
The report by the Government Accountability Office to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee prompted its chairman, Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), to send a “concern” letter to John Hill, FMCSA administrator, requesting the agency to bring its policies in line with the federal statute.
Oberstar also chided FMCSA for failing to provide a significant reduction in truck-related traffic deaths.
“In June, we met with the GAO to discuss their initial findings,” Hill said through FMCSA spokeswoman Melissa DeLaney.
“We also met with the inspector general to discuss his report on similar issues. We agreed to change our policy at that time to address the findings of both parties and are in the process of moving forward,” Hill continued.
“Our efforts to target high-risk carriers for compliance reviews has no doubt contributed to the 5% reduction in large truck-related fatalities last year, and we appreciate the GAO’s acknowledgement of our successful record on these matters,” he said.
The GAO report said that while FMCSA does assess maximum fines against carriers that repeat the same serious safety violation, it does not “assess maximum fines against all of the serious violators that we believe the law requires.”
The report also said the 1999 federal law requires maximum fines for carriers that show a pattern of violating several different regulations.
In addition, both the GAO study and Oberstar criticized FMCSA’s so-called “three strikes” rule, which applies the maximum allowable fine only when it finds a motor carrier has violated the same regulation three times within six years. The 1999 law requires that violators be given the maximum fine after a second violation of the same regulation, GAO said.
“FMCSA’s practice violates the specific statutory requirements of the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999 in a way that is indefensible and unacceptable,” Oberstar wrote Sept. 14 in his letter of concern. “I strongly urge FMCSA to amend its policies immediately to be consistent with statutory requirements with respect to maximum penalties for repeat rule violators.”
Oberstar gave FMCSA 30 days to tell him what specific actions the agency has taken to comply with the 1999 law.
He said the 1999 law also included a goal of cutting the number of fatalities related to commercial motor vehicles 50% by 2009, and FMCSA was failing to meet that goal.
“FMCSA has made little progress toward this goal: in 2005, 5,212 individuals were killed in large truck crashes, compared to 5,365 in 1999,” Oberstar wrote.
Congress passed the 1999 law, which established FMCSA as an agency separate from the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Motor Carriers, after criticism of the OMC. FMCSA was created as the primary Department of Transportation agency for truck and bus safety and began operating in 2000.
In September 1999 testimony, Kenneth Mead, who was DOT’s inspector general, told Congress safety enforcement had declined in recent years and the average fine settlement for safety violators had dropped to $1,600 in 1998 from $3,700 in 1995.
“In [fiscal year] 1998, enforcement actions were processed on only 11% of the 29 most-violated safety regulations identified by OMC’s safety investigators,” Mead told Congress. “Violators have come to consider the low fines imposed by OMC not a deterrent, but merely a cost of doing business.”
In recent congressional testimony, DOT’s current inspector general, Calvin Scovel, also said FMCSA was not issuing maximum penalties in cases where it should.
“Based on our work in 2006, we noted a loophole in FMCSA’s enforcement policy that allowed hundreds of motor carriers to repeatedly violate significant safety rules without exposure to maximum penalties,” Scovel told the House Transportation Committee in July.
“When you go easy on violators and you look the other way and you cut people a lot of slack, then basically a large part of the industry will not reform,” said Jerry Donaldson, senior research director of the nonprofit Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
“Right now, that agency does not have a deterrent value in the way it enforces violations and assesses penalties.”
