"FMCSA launched a new carrier registry three weeks ago to stop freight fraud -- zero new carriers have been registered since."
That's the story going around some industry news websites after the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's big Motus launch last month, and like a lot of shocking headlines, it's almost certainly not true.
The big misunderstanding stems from the fact that Motus reports data differently than the legacy system. It's pretty technical, but experts at the Central Analysis Bureau, owned by Fusable (also Overdrive's parent company), cracked the code and provided the following statistics:
- Newly registered DOT numbers: 12,711
- Newly granted carrier authorities, or MC numbers: 4,337
Both of those stats are as of Motus' launch the week of the Monday May 18, according to CAB, and through June 9.
Those stats line up with a press release FMCSA sent out one week following Motus' launch, which claimed the following milestones:
- Motus successfully received 120,000 new user applicants.
- 10,000 regulated-entity applications were processed.
- More than 13,000 motor carriers claimed their USDOT numbers.
In fairness to those who got the number wrong, or somehow believed that FMCSA went nearly a month without granting a single carrier authority (the agency normally approves about 5,000 a month), the Motus rollout has been messy.
Take a look at this random carrier's docket on the new Motus site. Does this make any sense?
Imagine brokers scrambling to assess carrier safety in the wake of the recent Supreme Court broker liability case and seeing that a carrier's status is "active," and the reason for the active status is "revoked."
Good luck, everyone.
How about authority revocations? Shouldn't Motus have caught some scofflaws? Isn't FMCSA investigating a number of shady chameleon carriers and trying to move at a breakneck pace to shut them down?
That part is pretty well incomprehensible at this point, even for CAB, who has been ahead of the game in tracking as new data flows out of Motus.
Data hasn't exactly migrated perfectly from the old Licensing & Insurance site. Here's what that site has to say about Bub and Son, the carrier shown in the image above from Motus.
The carrier Motus called both "active" and "revoked" is in fact inactive, according to the old site.
"We're seeing FMCSA make changes to the data daily," said Shuie Yankelewitz, CAB's Chief Product Officer. "So we know it's a work in progress."
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