Off the top of this Overdrive Radio edition, the voice of Atlantic Logistics CEO Rob Hooper talking about trust, responding specifically to a question about whether all the shipper, broker and carrier friction in today’s freight markets is driving wedges between the relationships.
Regular listeners well know what we're talking about -- cyber fraud and identity verifications pingpongig back and forth between the parties, slowing freight bookings as the opposite, distrust, breeds all around.
Our big broker-and-carrier-vetting survey this year saw 66% of owner-operators name principally negative principal impacts after the rise in carrier vetting platforms specifically. Among them was roughly 1 in every 10 survey respondent owner-operators who called out as principal impact the wedge of distrust increased scrutiny continued to drive between them and brokerage partners.
Down full survey results via this link, or by filling out the short form below.
In this week's Labor Day edition of the podcast, a look into the FTR Transportation Intelligence conference, an annual affair held last week where late in the day Tuesday broker Rob Hooper was joined by:
- National Motor Freight Traffic Association Chief Operations and Technical Officer Joe Ohr
- Dale Prax, FreightValidate founder and now a strategic advisor to Truckstop.com
- FTR Trucking Vice President Avery Vise, moderating the talk through issues of revenue fraud like double-brokering and increasingly sophisticated cargo theft rings, and touching on what was on everybody’s mind Tuesday that first day of September after Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security announced the new White House fraud task force.
Prax offered background on it from his perspective, and you can read a whole lot more about it from Overdrive's own Alex Lockie’s in follow-on reports:
- Initial announcement of CDL school sweeps, and plans for task force
- Targeted schools respond
- The otherwise reputable schools caught up in Training Provider Registry scortched-earth tactics
Prax calls back to 2023 when Vice President J.D. Vance was part of a group of Senators pushing for the idea of a fraud task force as cop on the block to police double-brokering and ID-theft-enabled revenue fraud, cargo theft by fraud, and the many other forms these interstate freight crimes take. Some credit can go to longtime transport attorney Hank Seaton for proferring the very idea of a task force years earlier, and for the current administration for advancing it in the current form.
Of course, as Prax also acknowledges, much of the meat of the announcement a week ago, and subsequent press attention, has been angled straight on policing CDL schools and immigration through English requirements and the like. Prax reads it as a way to garner more attention to the Dalilah’s Law legislation stalled in Congress and that would codify the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s almost total ban of non-domiciled CDLs for non-citizens.
The federal court challenge against that rule is set for oral arguments in just more than a week. Whether it will remain standing hangs in the balance.
[Related: How non-domiciled drivers will try to get FMCSA's CDL ban thrown out]
Yet given Vance’s lead involvement on the task force, and the demonstrated concern expressed by the Senator in past over longstanding cargo-theft and revenue-fraud issues, there's hope for a more intense prosecutorial footing on those fronts in the coming years.
There’s plenty all truckers and other parties in legit freight transactions can do actively, too, in combat. As you’ll hear from Joe Ohr in particular, NMFTA has new threat-reporting and information sharing tools available that are free to participate in, detailed here. Take a listen:
[Related: FMCSA's broker transparency rule: Another date missed, more owner-ops going direct]
