While I’m on the subject of CSA, I thought I’d share a bit of an update to this month’s Truckers News CSA cover story. In it, during dicussion of the DataQs system and Ed Webb’s case (which I wrote about yesterday), OOIDA’s Joe Rajkovacz raises a very particular problem with Pre-Employment Screening Program driver inspection/crash history reports that team drivers were noting. Here’s the relevant text from the story, after a summary of Webb’s particular DataQs issue:
Rajkovacz says OOIDA has been hearing many such stories about the DataQs process, formerly used by mostly larger motor carriers, now that individual drivers are using the system under CSA. “The challenges filed are automatically routed back to the jurisdiction that issued the inspection,” he says. “In many cases, it is the officer who is asked to evaluate his own operation — in the past, nobody ever cared because there wasn’t this [CSA] scoring. However, there is now the PSP.”
He gives the example of several cases of drivers in team operations, “where the lead driver goes through an inspection,” he says. Later, the driver sees associated inspection violations show up on both his and his partner’s PSP reports.
When I talked to Rajkovacz, as noted in the story, he did say FMCSA had been at work on a fix to the problem, which has now arrived. Says agency spokesperson Shashunga Clayton, “We are now highlighting co-driver items on PSP reports. Information that is charged to the “co-driver” is now clearly identified in the inspection detail portion of the report. This will give the customer enough information to correctly determine if a given violation is associated with the driver they are evaluating.” For an example of what this will look like, check out the sample report and close-up on the driver “listed as co-driver” in the last line provided below.
And the close-up: