FMCSA in Trouble with Another Agency

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is finding itself under fire from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), saying that the agency dealing with commercial vehicle safety needs to set better standards in handling complaints.

Details

The full report, which you can read on the GAO’s relevant webpage, spans sixty pages, but the entire debacle can be summarized by fourteen recommendations that the GAO has provided for the FMCSA to complete so that it may step up its game.

“Specifically, FMCSA has not (1) defined some key terms in its guidance for reviewing complaints or (2) included detailed steps in its guidance for reviewing all categories of complaints,” the GAO report states on page 14. “For example, an FMCSA reviewer must decide if a complaint made by a truck driver against an electronic logging device provider with the allegation ‘the company failed to respond to my service request in a timely manner’ should be treated as a safety or other category of complaint. According to FMCSA officials, a complaint against an electronic logging device provider falls under the safety complaint category, but we found this is not laid out in FMCSA’s complaint review guidance.”

To this end, the GAO has provided 14 points of interest that it believes the FMCSA can improve upon. These include:

• “The FMCSA Administrator should ensure FMCSA updates its complaint review guidance to define the characteristics a complaint must have, such as who submitted the complaint and the nature of the incident, to qualify as a motorist complaint.”
• “The FMCSA Administrator should ensure the National Consumer Complaint Database website has performance standards, such as goals and measures, and that the website is assessed against the performance standards.”
• “The FMCSA Administrator should ensure the National Consumer Complaint Database website contains information that is appropriately accessible for users with limited English proficiency.”

Conclusion

It is interesting to see the FMCSA, who is usually in the business of enacting course-correcting behaviors such as the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, receive its own standards that it is required to uphold. The only question that remains is how many of the fourteen recommendations the FMCSA will follow, and how long it will take to do them.

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