The very day after Matt Cole's story about July Trucker of the Month Jeffrey Crise, hotshot hauler and now also employing a driver in addition to himself in a 2019 Peterbilt 579, Crise's A&J Transport and Recovery motor carrier authority was marked with an "Involuntary suspension" in Motus, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's new registration system.
The suspension followed close on the heels of an updated filing by his current insurer, replacing his prior insurance after shopping coverage with a new agent. His profile shows quite clearly an active policy meeting the minimum required insurance for his operating authority.
Yet this is the result:
Reason for the involuntary suspension: "No active insurance meeting minimum coverage on file," as shown in this screenshot. Yet note the "active" status at the bottom right next to Crise's insurance policy in the system.
We've written about, and FMCSA has acknowledged in some cases, a variety of snags that carriers have run into in the wake of the transition to Motus, which began in earnest in May. But this one, for Crise, couldn't have come at a worse time.
As reported at the end of July, starting this month he was putting that second truck, the Pete, to work with a driver employed by his A&J Transport & Recovery business, pulling a flatbed. It was always going to mean a fair amount of prospecting for freight outside of his go-to brokers through whom he loaded his own piloted hotshot.
The authority suspension hit in Motus as of the first of the month. "I thought it was just a glitch in the system," he said. Since the Motus transition, A&J Transport has also shown there with active broker authority, inexplicably.
Crise hasn't maintained that with a bond for years, he noted, and that's reflected in his Motus profile, too.
Here's a screengrab of the operaing authority page for the nonexistent A&J brokerage -- note no active bond on file, yet authority status (top right) is "active"? If you can make sense of it, we're all ears!
I asked our Fusable sister company CAB whether they might be able to quantify the extent of problems for carriers like Crise, with active insurance on file yet their authority in suspension. He's not alone since the Motus transition, to say the least.
Taking a snapshot today, CAB analysts found more than 1,200 carriers with an active insurance filing that matched their minimum required level, but who nonetheless remained under such an "involuntary suspension" for those insurance reasons.
FMCSA did not respond to queries delivered today about reasons for the suspensions in time for this story's publication.
As we've reported previously, FMCSA's press office, at least, has been responsive to prior Motus-glitch cases we've notified them of, and in several cases problems have since resolved. (Send email to me if you're dealing with something similar currently: [email protected].)
[Related: FMCSA suspends USDOT deactivations as Motus issues mount for carriers]
We notified FMCSA of owner-operator Crise's situation Wednesday morning, when we became aware of it, and reps noted they didn't understand why the suspension happened, and that they were delivering the case to their Motus team.
Crise has heard nothing since but for his own further calls into the FMCSA contact center, met with promises of a callback from a supervisor that hadn't happened as of this morning.
During the most recent such call, laying out the details above, he said the rep he was talking to noted she could "see it right here in front of me," he said, yet was at a total loss to explain why it happened.
I suppose he could go out and broker as much freight as he wants to, and without a bond, but he's dead in the water as a carrier outside those he knows well and who understand the nature of the Motus mess ongoing.
Crise sees a central problem as one of basic customer service at the agency. "You just can’t get hold of anybody you need to actually speak to" who can correct the problem, he said, issues the agency has at least somewhat acknowledged since the transition to Motus began in May.
For him, today marks nearly two weeks he's been actively attempting to correct the issue, to no avail, meanwhile forgoing $1K in revenue, easy, per day that his hotshot alone sits -- he's occupied all day long attempting to keep his driver moving, with exceptional difficulty.
More than 1,200 other carriers are in similar status, as noted.
[Related: FMCSA new-authority counts fall to zero after Motus? Not quite]
Until just a few days back, that number would have included small fleet owner Kristin Crawford's DPW Inc. 16-driver dry van fleet, headquartered in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She got the recent good news, at least, that their authority is back from its own "involuntary suspension."
I first talked to Crawford at the very end of July, and similarly that same day forwarded details about her case to FMCSA's press team, when the suspension had been in place for about 20 days. It would go on for 20-plus more.
The situation is resolved now, but her fleet's profit-and-loss statement, she said, shows a $23K hit in the red for income in the last month as a result. As the Motus authority suspension flowed through the digital ecosystems of Highway and other companies that middlemen increasingly rely on for authority checks, as with Jeffrey Crise, Crawford's fleet hit a wall with any broker it wasn't long-set-up with and/or who knew enough to understand the Motus situation.
"We did so much deadheading" while suspended, she said, and costs added up without the revenue to recoup them. All the while at risk of big fines if not a shutdown given the suspension, in spite of active, valid insurance. (Crawford notes that, luckily, they were not inspected during the time period, not the case for some other small fleets we've heard about in similar situations.)
Crise, today, is running that risk himself, he fully admits. "I'll be out of service" if inspected, he noted this morning, the next to final day of the annual Brake Safety Week inspection event.
Crawford noted, similarly, that DPW just "couldn't afford to stop" despite the risk. "I had to keep going," she said. And though she took some heart in advice delivered by associations she's a member of that many, if not all, inspectors around the country were at least somewhat aware of the Motus issues, the stress of it all certainly weighed on her.
As she told me in late July when it was ongoing, "I think they should have just shut the Motus system down until they actually have this all good. If I don’t have a heart attack over this I will be shocked."
Thankfully, I'm here to report I spoke to Kristin Crawford this morning and she is well -- physically, that is.
"I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown at one point," she said, and trying to get Highway call-center reps to understand her predicament just added to it all, to say nothing of some of the brokers that utilize that service.
"I personally feel that the people brokering the freight" these days by and large "don’t know anything about the industry," she said. So many are "just moving one load from one screen to another to get the commission."
If brokers truly want to verify their carriers are who they say they are so badly, she suggested moving beyond the computer screen, build real relationships with real people, true conversations, meetings, calls.
"Highway’s got to be killing people over this," she said of her own experience attempting to reason with call-center customer service (seeming based overseas, with limited English, at all times of the day) about Motus-derived issues, about the company's ELD connection demands on DPW trucks that aren't even running in some cases.
The entire mess is "making people want to shut down," she said of small fleets in her situation. "If that’s what they want, they’re doing a good job."
Her solution to getting her authority back fully active wasn't a matter of hounding FMCSA's call centers, ultimately. She calls it a "miracle," ultimately, of finally finding "someone who knew someone who knew someone who had real power," she said. To this day, she's still getting emails from FMCSA's ticket system saying they're working on the issue, meantime.
Here's hoping that work doesn't mess something else up.
[Related: Millions in military freight awarded to convicted fraudster]
