Few things I learned today.

Hey all,

Would like to contribute to this forum and spill a few things that we learned from our D.O.T Audit that just ended today.

1) For any carrier who has three or less "basic" alerts, they will be subject to a "focused compliance review" audit which means that they will be just particularly focusing on those alerts. For any carrier who has four basic alerts, they are subject to a "Full Compliance Review" which means they are going full-throttle and will require 6 mos worth of logs, ect and more. Now, what is the difference? Nothing really.... besides rating the carriers now.

If you get a "Focused Review" - you do not get a satisfactory anymore. You can either be rated at

- Non-Ratable Review (Equivalent to a Satisfactory)
- Conditional (same rules go as a regular compliance audit, you're not running a safe operation here.)
- Unsatisfactory (obvious here - you're screwed!)

If you get a "Compliance Review";

- Satisfactory still applies.
- Conditional
- Unsatisfacotry

Here's where it gets weird now...... according to this Federal D.O.T Auditor,

Ratings will be going away and they are working on a new system which they will release this upcoming 4th quarter or at the start of 2015. Ratings will go away and scores will only be based on Numbers now. Those numbers are your basic alerts and thresholds.. Going to be interesting as to how this will pan out.

2) D.O.T Physical cards

Somewhere around September or October, D.O.T Medical Cards will now have bar codes in which will let the inspectors who do roadside inspections have the ability to scan them and pull up that medical history and where it was obtained, whom it was obtained from and more. This is going to be really interesting.

3) Carrier's ability to search Blacklisted Drivers

This year, FMSCA will be rolling out the ability for Carriers who already can login to the SAFER to view black listed drivers. This will practically be used as a hiring tool and those black listed drivers can have their PSP reports obtained at no cost for carrier's sake. Blacklisted Drivers can only be blacklisted by the FMSCA DOT(Duh!) and they seem very serious about this up-coming tool.

All in all, this may be new or may just be old news... but thought i'd search some insight. As far as our Focused Review audit, it was practically a compliance review(seriously no difference - still requested the same amount of material that a compliance review would have asked for and checked over everything thoroughly.) but this sucker wouldnt give us a satisfactory! Oh well, gave us a non-ratable review.. Doh.