DOT Inspector General Agrees to Audit CSA After Request From Congress

By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter

This story appears in the Oct. 22 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Department of Transportation’s Inspector General has agreed to conduct an in-depth audit of the government’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program and to include a look at the relationship between carrier safety scores and crash risks.

The Oct. 12 audit request was made by Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, and the ranking Democratic member, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.).

“Witnesses at the Sept. 13 [subcommittee] hearing raised 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,” said the audit request letter from the congressmen.

Peter Barber, an analyst with the DOT inspector general, confirmed last week that one focus of the audit probably will be on the relationship of CSA carrier safety data to crash risk. He spoke during a meeting of a specially appointed CSA subcommittee of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee.

Barber said the congressional subcommittee wants the audit completed by August, although an IG spokesman told Transport Topics that no specific timeline has been set.

The congressional audit request specifically called on the IG to “characterize the relationship between scores and future crash risk,” examine whether the weight given to each violation is tied to crash risk or crash severity, and if it is possible for carriers to “have high scores that erroneously reflect the fleet’s safety performance.”

Also, the subcommittee wants to know if it is possible for some carriers with potential safety problems to not be identified and targeted by CSA.

“FMCSA makes carriers’ scores public so that third parties involved in the transportation industry can make safety-based business decisions,” one of the audit questions in the letter said. “Given your findings, is a carrier’s CSA score an accurate portrayal of the safety of the carrier? If so, is this accurate for all” the components of the safety program, known as BASICs... Continue reading. (Log in to TTNEWS is Required.)