IRP Estimations

Not sure if FL has a sticker for the plate as well, but you will need to have the IFTA stickers, one on each side of the truck.

 

An almost exact quote from my auditor is, " I don't think you're lying on your reports, which is why I only dropped your fuel mileage down to 4.7 mpg, I could have gone down to 4. You're just missing the required information, so you'll have to pay the fine". Was your audit an IRP/IFTA audit, or a general audit Red?

 

No sticker. FL will give you a new plate each year and the month it expires is on the plate. So how much was it?

 

It was IRP/IFTA. The period was the previous 3 years. A couple weeks following the notice, I spoke with the auditor on the phone. He explained the process and we discussed the records I had available. On that call he explained their method to pick three quarters for a spot check, and then dig deeper if there were problems. His original approach was an in person meeting at my home to collect paper documentation. After hearing my description of my record keeping, he agreed to work with electronic documents to see how that would go. What I really think was, he was based in Macon and didn't want to make a trip to the other side of ATL just for that LOL. Anyway, I put my IFTA and IRP workbooks for the quarters he asked for, along with electronic logbook pages, on my Google Drive for him to download. A few weeks later he called to tell me everything was good and that there would be a paper notice of that in the mail shortly. I got that a few days later.

One thing worth mentioning is that the GPS reports never come out without some flaws. You do have to scan for errors and fix them up a little. I have Garmin 560LMT GPS in both trucks. To start, I sort the trip segment table to list segments from recent to oldest, by sorting starting odometer in descending order.

The most common error is 2 or 3 duplicate trip segments right at the end of the quarter. Those are easy to spot - two adjacent trip segment lines with exactly the same total miles. If the GPS should happen to lock up during a run, that segment will disappear. That happens about 1-2 times a year and is easy to fix up using mapping software to fill in the blank segment manually.

Both of those are easily spotted by running a check column that shows the difference between the starting odometer from one segment and the ending odo from the previous one. Any values in that column greater than a few tenths of a mile indicate a possible problem. On my workbook, I total those differences and distribute that into the state mileage totals proportionally. That way, all recorded miles get into the IFTA and IRP filings. I also run a checksum with the first and last odometer reading to insure that my calculated state totals equal that value.

That's why I was saying maybe FL is more strict. Could also be that the auditor I worked with was more comfortable with the electronic documentation. I did spend about a half hour on the phone with him on that first call walking him through how I created those spreadsheets. I e-mailed him one of them and took him through it step by step.

 

I talked once to the lady in IRP and she said there are a few things that trigger an audit. High MPG. High MPG when previous quarters are much lower. New Mexico, NY and KY do not match up. VMT does not match. Truck GPS units that record miles have always been acceptable and preferred since they export into XLS spreadsheet format.

Good post Red.

 

According to an article that I read about this yesterday, the new IRP will work more like IFTA. We will no longer be penalized for not having miles in a particular state, but only be charged for miles run in each state. We will no longer be able to take states off our cab cards. The new cards will have all the states and Canadian provinces on them. That makes more sense than what we have seen up to this point. My IRP office told me that my base plate charge should go down this coming year. In my state we renew on a staggered schedule. Some states use calender years. The IRP lady didn't mention whether our renewal dates will change. My guess is that they will remain the same. They like having them staggered so that they can spread the workload over 12 months rather than 1. My IRP has been really high the last couple of years. I am anxious to see how much it will cost in the coming year. There will no longer be estimated miles when we get our base plate. Everything will be based upon actual miles run. That is more fair. In my case, I have kept states on my cab card where I had no miles and was penalized for it the next year. That will no longer happen under the new system.