"Stay out of Motus!" --NASTC President David Owen reiterating the message of compliance consultant Jeff Davis delivered in this week's Overdrive Radio podcast edition
Fleet Safety Services consultant Jeff Davis and NASTC Insurance Services agent Mike Jordan Oct. 29 delivered nuanced detail on the message above to attendees of the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies.
According to Davis, the fundamental advice for carriers came direct just a week prior from the man responsible for the Motus system, Ken Riddle, Director of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Office of Registration.
System logins and attempts by registered carriers to change details within FMCSA registration records, Davis and Jordan both said, are in some cases triggering suspensions of authority or inactive designations for the USDOT number, or both. Either outcome is the last thing any motor carrier wants, given risks of being placed out-of-service roadside and, of course, forgoing revenue-earning business out of caution, in wait of FMCSA assistance that can be a long time coming.
[Related: FMCSA's Motus mess costing small fleets thousands]
Though Motus may indeed be improving little by little, there are still an untold number of carriers in those very situations.
Oct. 27, just two days before Davis and Jordan were speaking to NASTC members, more than 5,600 carriers' authority was suspended, effectively shutting them down. For most, the "involuntary suspension" appeared to be the result of a mismatch between a system-designated required insurance minimum of $1M and their insurers' filing showing just the minimum $750,000 for non-hazmat operations.
All, however, had pre-Motus authority, according to Overdrive's Fusable sister data company CAB's snapshot of Motus registration data taken Oct. 29, the day Davis and Jordan were speaking. Those 5,600 suspended carriers joined nearly a thousand others similarly suspended dating back to July. The following graph shows the timeline by date the suspension went active.
Since the Motus transition began in May, Overdrive has tracked involuntary suspensions triggered by glitches after an insurance update and other changes, but never such a high volume of carriers suspended in a single day, as shown with Oct. 27's off-the-chart spike in the graph.
Overdrive sister fleet publication CCJ told the story of one carrier caught up in the recent suspensions, Illinois-headquartered Dynamic MD, whose authority was administratively reactivated two days later following CCJ's report. The same couldn't be said for Michael Sparks, owner-operator out of West Virginia, also one of the Oct. 27-suspended carriers.
Owner-operator Michael Sparks hauls with authority with this 2001 Freightliner.
Sparks learned of the suspension when he arrived at a site to load in Pennsylvania, and "got pulled up on by a city patrolman" who ran his DOT number, he said. "He informed me that my authority was inactive."
After several calls placed to the FMCSA, he was ultimately informed a full week and more later that a "glitch in the system," he said, meant he was bumped into the $1M liability-insurance-requirement category like "a lot of carriers," he said, for Class 9 hazmat.
Yet there was another problem. As far as he was concerned, he was covered at that level, but the insurance provider’s certification said only $750K.
It's been a reality in the Motus system since the beginning, as it attempted to tie commodity type moved, as declared by the carrier, to the insurance minimum required to register operating authority. In Sparks' case, his carrier information (reflected in the old Safer system) indicated he would be hauling motor vehicles and machinery, for instance, in addition to other more general freight types. Motor vehicles, a Class 9 hazmat freight category given the fuel they require, generally necessitate $1M in liability insurance, not the $750K Sparks appeared in the system to be carrying.
Sparks rarely hauls cars or other Class 9 freight, though he'd always intended to and was paying for a $1M policy for the occasional vehicle. He's uncertain why the insurer filed at just $750K, but nonetheless a corrected filing by the insurer, and Sparks’ persistence with FMCSA’s customer service people, seems have done the trick. His authority returned active this past Friday, Nov. 6.
What remains unclear is why it happened Oct. 27 for Sparks and those thousands of others.
FMCSA did not respond to queries about the reasons for the large volume of suspensions on that date, though the public affairs office did note they shared Sparks' case with the registration team on Nov. 5. He'd been suspended 10 days when it lifted the next day.
Sparks shut himself down when he learned of the suspension, cancelling more than one scheduled pickup that very day.
He’s in the clear now, but out as much as $8K-$10K in revenue that he doesn’t hold much hope of getting back. Also: a violation on the record for operating without authority he's in the early stages of challenging via the DataQs process.
[Related: Truckers' DataQs to-do: Timely, thorough filings for the win]
Any positive from the registration turmoil?
On the positive side of all the Motus mess, self-help practices to mitigate these kinds of situations are beginning to emerge. In this week's podcast, Jeff Davis urges all small fleets to:
- At least once a week, check your authority status via the Motus public lookup -- don't try to login.
- If you find it inactive, similarly, don't try to login and make changes yourself.
- Rather, pick up a phone and call FMCSA's registration contact center -- 800-832-5660 -- to get a support ticket started to repair the situation.
Davis himself has been in active communication with registration staff since the Motus mess began back in May, helping more than one of his clients get back up and running after Motus glitches/peculiarities deactivated their authority unexpectedly. On Oct. 22, underscoring the don't log in advice, he received this communication from FMCSA's Riddle, illustrating the mess isn't over by a long stretch:
At this time, we are prioritizing cases involving regulated entities with critical, time-sensitive issues that are preventing them from operating.
If you (your clients) are active and in good standing and do not have an immediate registration need, there is no urgency for you (them) to access Motus or make changes to their records at this time. We encourage entities with time-sensitive registration needs to use Motus as necessary, while we continue our stabilization and remediation efforts.
This includes biennial updates. FMCSA has temporarily suspended enforcement of the biennial update requirement and associated USDOT number inactivations, so carriers do not need to access Motus solely for the purpose of completing a biennial update while the temporary relief remains in effect.
For any entity that is not active and needs immediate assistance to operate, we will assist if possible. Our priority is assisting those who cannot work because of a Motus record or system issue.
The principal point Davis takes from that? It's how this story started: Stay out of Motus!
It's not 100% new advice. FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs' first public communication about Motus just a couple weeks into the transition advised carriers similarly at that time.
Clearly the mess Motus created hasn't been wiped up fully, by any measure. In this week's Overdrive Radio podcast, hear more from Davis and NASTC Insurance Services managing agent Mike Jordan about where to monitor status, and what to look for, without logging into the Motus system.
Given the scale of the problems, Davis expects more grace to be offered to carriers on the required biennial MCS-150 updates Riddle mentioned being suspended for now.
In short, it could be many months before Motus is fully stabilized. Take a listen:
Also in the podcast, Davis and Jordan deliver insight on the "seller's market," Davis said, that is the current commercial auto liability insurance world. Insurance cost and availability rank No. 3 among the American Transportation Research Institute's top issues for motor carriers and drivers, as separately ranked by many of you, Overdrive readers, with results as of November 9. (Insurance is currently falling behind only fuel prices and parking.)
The poll's still open, if you've as yet missed it, however. Weigh in below.
As Jordan and Davis both emphasize in the podcast, there's nonetheless plenty a small fleet or one-truck carrier can do with Davis' three M's of data handling -- "Monitor, manage, memorialize" -- to use it to your advantage at renewal. More on the subject at this link.
[Related: Trucking insurance: How to make underwriters fight for your business]
