Supreme Court rules 9-0 trucking broker can be sued after deadly crashes

It's ironic, but the great part of them doing that, is Super Ego is going to have to defend themselves in all their outstanding court cases about how they are a carrier while accepting these kind of awards, and defense attorneys are going to drag C.H. Robinson and I'm sure there are other companies who have given them same type of award into court to say yeah they are registered as a carrier with us.

 

What he’s getting at is that’s the claim Super Ego makes but CHR named them one of their carriers of the year. In CHR’s eyes they deal with and view Super Ego as a carrier.

 

Here’s a Super Ego company. Shows one truck and a few inspections up until April when it jumps to 232 trucks. Seems like the FMCSA could build something into their coding that would flag an authority when the number of trucks and drivers jumps like that.

 

That's the claim they like to make, the good part of most of the lawsuits are civil jury based who won't make those distinctions, but also accepting awards that state you are a carrier won't help them in court or with the feds. It also brings more unwanted attention to C.H. Robinson, as they are going to 100% get dragged into the litigation as a witness, and be asked for business records.

 

Freightwaves has done some great articles about VIN pooling among all these small 1099 outfits not just in Chicago. There are a lot of things the FMCSA could do enforcement and investigation wise. Even just starting with all the registrations that share an address, how hard would it be to send an investigator to an address that has 30 companies registered to it and ask for all the documents they are suppose to have on hand?

 

They could, if they still had their own IT department, but that got cut/merged with DOT's IT department which also experienced personal cuts. FMCSA has about 12% fewer staff than last year. Pretty hard to enforce regulations on those systematically skirting the law when they can't even catch the idiots who don't know they're breaking the law.

But even if they had the staff and resources, I doubt anything would be done about Super Ego because doing so would endanger the entire L/P and L/O ecosystem and too many people make too much money off it. Outside of FMCSA, the Department of Labor and the DOJ could get involved in the class action lawsuit or begin implementing the recommendations of the Truck Leasing Task Force. H. R. 5423 was immediately referred to sub committee last September and hasn't been touched since. Chameleon carriers and L/P scams have been a problem for decades. Companies profit off them while society absorbs the negative impacts. Until it becomes unprofitable, nothing will change.