FMCSA Household Goods Panel Aims to Stop Dishonest Movers
This story appears in the Jan. 9 print edition of Transport Topics.
WASHINGTON — An increasing number of today’s interstate household moves aren’t executed by the nation’s 4,153 traditional moving companies, according to the newly formed Household Goods Consumer Protection Working Group, posing potential harm to consumers by unregulated firms usually found online.
That was the focus of the group’s inaugural meeting Jan 4-5 at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“We’re focusing on the companies that are deliberately trying to circumvent the rules,” said Joe DeLorenzo of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which has been in charge of regulating the moving sector since 1999 and was the meeting’s host. The panel was created as a mandate of the FAST Act.
Overall, the industry is facing downturn in long-distance moves by individuals, corporations and the military, officials said (see story, p. 1).
The 15-member group, scheduled to meet three more times before issuing a report to Congress in September, is charged with helping FMCSA do a better job of educating consumers who are looking to move as well as reducing the paperwork required of them and the motor carriers who execute those moves.
Future meetings will convene in three subgroups via conference calls.
One subgroup is working on condensing FMCSA’s 10-year-old Ready To Move brochure from eight pages into a handful of bullet points.
“We’re in a 140-character world,” said panelist John Esparza, CEO of the Southwest Movers Association and of the Texas Trucking Association, referring to Twitter.
Another subgroup is focusing on how to better educate consumers, perhaps through podcasts, webinars and texts or at such gathering places of potential movers as bridal showers and college open houses.
“Educate yourself before you book a move,” said Chuck White of the International Association of Movers.
The other subgroup aims to simplify the paperwork involved in estimates, orders of services and bills of lading.
T.J. Carney of Carney McNicholas Inc. said his Youngstown, Ohio, firm recently had a 45-page agreement with a customer.
Recommendations from the subgroups are due to the full group at its next meeting March 8-9.
The Household Goods Consumer Protection Working Group also aims to encourage state law enforcement to pursue the companies that circumvent the rules. Some low-ball estimates and ask for much more from customers later; others take customers’ belongings, called hostage loads, according to the members of the group.
FMCSA has 15 employees working full time on these issues with some help from 475 more who pursue all of the agency’s safety investigations. The agency keeps a list of the 100 movers who have been the subject of the most complaints — 3,134 in 2016, up from 2,735 in 2015.
“That is troubling for us,” said FMCSA’s Kenneth Rodgers, whose agency maintains the protectyourmove.gov website for consumers.
Members of the working group complained that millennials, who became the majority of American workers in late 2015, far too often find their movers via the internet, where rogue companies have mastered analytics to drive traffic, and then customers, to their websites.
“Everyone picks the fanciest website and as we all know, it doesn’t take a whole lot of resources to make a fancy website and have poor quality services,” said the group’s chairman, Dan Veoni of the American Moving and Storage Association.
“I see the bad guys out ahead of the curve in understanding how consumers find movers,” White added. “I hate the term rogue movers. They’re criminals.”
UniGroup’s Heather Parino spearheads the company’s MoveRescue division, which has assisted 4,000 customers over the last dozen years after failed moves.
“People who aren’t movers give movers a bad name,” Parino said.
