The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration doesn't revoke authorities every day. Authority revocation decisions come in batches. Throughout this year, as FTR Transportation Intelligence Vice President Avery Vise pointed out to me recently, there's typically one large-volume revocation day per week. That day is most often Monday, with much smaller numbers of revocations following Tuesday and Wednesday.
The week of Thanksgiving, though, Vise spied an anomaly.
As summarized in FTR's "Weekly Transportation Update" report last week, not only did the agency revoke just more than 1,000 authorities on Monday, November 20 (a fairly typical level throughout the year), FMCSA added more than 1,700 revocations to that total for the week the day before Thanksgiving, November 22.
Before you or other media out there start thinking, oh Lord (or oh joy, depending on the perspective), here comes the "bloodbath" and all that "capacity reduction" so many seem to pine after, the huge November 22 batch of revocations comes back to a single event in the agency's ongoing clean-up of its registration system, some of that brought on by acknowledgment of the double-brokering and fraud problems.
This single event, though, has to do with the FMCSA's list of blanket process agent (BOC3) companies maintained at this page on the agency's website. Every entity with motor carrier authority is required to have an agent in each state where they run for the purpose of serving court papers in that state. Blanket process agents are supposed to maintain agents in every state in the nation. Last December, according to longtime transportation attorney Hank Seaton, his own blanket company, Service of Process Agents, Inc., and others he knows were asked "to recertify their agents," which he did.
It wasn't exactly a painless process. Some took the opportunity with Seaton's contact to say, "Hey Hank, why don't you find somebody else," he said. Seaton's difficulties aside, according to the FMCSA in response to my questions, unlike Seaton's company, "some BOC3 blanket agent filers never responded, as they are no longer in business, and their filer accounts were locked."
