The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently made a group of recommendations to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) that would modernize what the organization collects in terms of complaint data as well as make it more accessible and usable for the public.
The FMCSA maintains complaint data – related to safety, like speeding or reckless driving, or to problems like unfair business practices – submitted against large commercial truck, moving and bus companies via its National Consumer Complaint Database (NCCDB). GAO posits that its guidance for its staff is unclear and that it makes some but not all complaint data available to the public. GAO says its 14 recommendations could help FMCSA improve its response to safety and other emerging concerns and improve transparency and collaboration with industry partners.
After speaking with Stephen Ritzler, team lead of trucking and logistics at insurance provider CoverWallet, these are a few of the recommendations that stand out:
• Recommendation No. 7: The FMCSA administrator should ensure FMCSA updates its complaint review guidance to require that FMCSA staff and managers enable auto-notifications for complaints for which they are responsible.
This would accelerate the feedback that owner operators get from complaints. Currently, there aren’t many standards, if any, that require the FMCSA to note who made the complaint, when it was made or the matter at hand. There are several recommendations that address these points, but Ritzler said No. 7 pertains to timeliness of feedback so companies can take action to improve.
“On the one hand, we have to think about the visibility of having a complaint about your business out in the public, but the flip side of that is how can you acknowledge and react and adapt to something if you're not made aware of it,” he said. “This is going to speed up that process for the trucking small business owner, and it's going to give them the ability to take ownership of that feedback and leverage it to make their business safer.”
• Recommendation No. 11: The FMCSA administrator should ensure the NCCDB website contains information that is appropriately accessible for users with limited English proficiency.
