Spotlight Grows Brighter on Compliance as Carriers Zero in on Finer Points

WHEN IS AN accident that is not your fault still your fault? For commercial drivers and the carriers that employ them, the answer can be found in the fine details.

To illustrate, Nic Sallis, COO of Atlanta-based Fleet Drive 360, describes a hypothetical situation in which the driver of a car runs a red light, and a commercial vehicle properly following the traffic rules drives through a green light, slams into the car and kills the driver. An onboard camera shows that the driver of the car was clearly at fault – however, the truck driver’s medical card expired the day before. Sallis said that leaves an opening for an opposing attorney to argue the commercial driver should not have been operating the truck in the first place.

In an environment full of such potential – and treacherous – potholes, carriers are paying increasingly close attention to all things compliance, putting a greater priority on the granular and the easily overlooked items that can lead to major complications in the future. In fact, for carriers, paying attention to such details has never been more vital, especially with driver turnover remaining a challenge without an easy solution. On top of that, Sallis noted that compliance penalties are growing from a regulatory standpoint, and the threat of a nuclear verdict in a legal case is higher than ever.

Sallis’s example of a possible expired medical card is only one of many potential points of exposure for carriers.

“If a driver has an accident – even if it’s not his fault – and the attorneys get involved and they start plowing through the driver’s records in the driver qualification file and see that you haven’t done your due diligence in assessing the driver before you hire them, they could go down the negligent hiring path,” said Leslie Prince, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Compliance Systems LLC. “Or if you have kept a driver who’s had multiple accidents, tickets, that sort of thing, then you get into negligent retention, and that can be problematic for a company as well.”

Consequently, Brett Phillips, president/CEO of The 1975 Transportation Group, a transportation and logistics company based in Georgia, said compliance has become a more prominent part of the driver recruitment and retention process for carriers in recent years.

“Rising insurance costs and increased litigation are the main contributors,” Phillips said. “We are literally an industry under attack from personal injury attorneys. Nuclear jury verdicts and high litigation defense costs are causing insurance companies and carriers to settle claims even when they are not at fault. You simply cannot afford to hire or retain risky drivers.”

DRIVER COMPLIANCE STARTS WITH RECRUITING

Attention to the finer points – including regulations – is crucial when recruiting and onboarding a new driver.

That means carriers must be thorough through every step of reviewing driver candidates. It’s about setting high criteria and ensuring your drivers can meet them.

“It starts with the recruiting process of properly vetting prospective drivers who meet or exceed your safety criteria and have a demonstrated previous commitment to safety and compliance,” Phillips said. “Ignoring warning signs in the hiring process identified by PSP (pre-screening program) reports, MVRs (motor vehicle records), background checks and previous employment verifications will ultimately cost you in the long run.”

As Prince said, “There’s nothing worse than pulling an MVR on a driver and the MVR is four pages long with lots of speeding tickets and following too closely and other things that are indications of unsafe driving, and then they get hired anyway.”

Sallis said the handoff of a new driver between a carrier’s HR professional and safety professional is where many mistakes happen.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in level one roadside inspections, which touch on driver fitness, and then level eight inspections, which touch on driver fitness as well as on company compliance,” Sallis said. “And if a driver is not onboarding correctly at the very beginning, everything that they’ve done from that point forward, an opposing counsel attorney can find some kind of loophole or some way to penetrate through and shift liability.”

COMPLIANCE AND EXISTING DRIVERS

One of the more common mistakes that carriers make is having problematic information about an existing driver and not paying attention to it. Prince said carriers should go beyond mere regulations and focus on best practices as it relates to drivers, including vetting them on an ongoing basis.

“It’s about thinking about what’s going to keep the attorneys and other stakeholders at bay if you do have an accident,” Prince said.

Fortunately, technology has been a game-changer for safety and compliance, Phillips said.

“Telematics, ELDs, in-cab cameras and speed management tools are very useful in identifying unsafe driving habits and non-compliance with regulations such as hours-of-service,” he said. “These tools can alert us to speeding, harsh braking events, rollover stability events and following too close, which are the leading causes of accidents. Coaching drivers while using this information can help prevent accidents and promote more defensive driving behavior.”

In addition to those alerts, Phillips said telematics and ELDs also can help carriers identify drivers who are abusing the usage of personal conveyance duty status while driving.

“Since the adoption of ELDs, improper usage of personal conveyance has become the most frequent HOS violation,” Phillips said. “Monitoring this daily by operations personnel and every week by safety personnel will help you identify a major compliance vulnerability and implement corrective action.”

Phillips said emerging compliance challenges have changed the way carriers view driver training.

“As a mid-sized fleet, we are utilizing a Learning Management System complete with hundreds of safety and compliance videos to provide driver training,” Phillips said. “General videos are assigned on a regular basis for all drivers to complete at their convenience. Specific training videos are assigned as part of the coaching process for drivers who have displayed an opportunity for improvement in an area. Drivers can access these training videos with their smartphones or tablets while on the road or at home. We also have a computer station set up at our terminal if they prefer to do the training that way.”

Prince said, “The continued training of your drivers is just huge.” Ongoing training is key to developing and maintaining a culture of safety within the company, helping to attract and retain drivers who find that important and to persuade drivers who do not find it appealing to look elsewhere for employment.

“Any training that a company can do, and documenting that the training has happened, is really important. Because when insurance carriers do come in to do your insurance renewals or when you do have a visit by the DOT, if they can see that you’re making an effort to continue the training and you’re doing a monthly driver meeting or a quarterly driver meeting and you’re using some online training and other new ways to do training, that’s really going to help you,” Prince said. “You want to be able to demonstrate that you are going above and beyond what is required. That goes a long way if you do have an unfortunate incident or an audit.”

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH

In the face of today’s pressures, carriers have ready access to data and other resources, and “they’re becoming more informed about what’s going on,” Prince said.

“The Georgia Motor Trucking Association and some other associations are great about informing members about what’s available and doing things like safety luncheons where they bring in speakers talking about the latest and greatest things available for motor carriers to help keep them in compliance,” Prince said.

Sallis said carriers should consider hiring attorneys to do mock audits of their processes to ensure they are not leaving themselves vulnerable with any detail of their approach to compliance. He said it is crucial that carriers have a documented process, including a step-by-step checklist that is followed with every newly hired driver.

“You need a system that is documented and repeatable to make sure you don’t miss any steps – because the risk of missing these steps could mean shutting your entire business down,” Sallis said. With the availability of information that already exists, emerging artificial intelligence (AI) solutions promise to get increasingly sophisticated and beneficial to the industry, particularly as the existing disparate systems become more connected, Sallis said.

“The more data that an AI model gets, the better it’s able to have an impact and provide insight, rather than just analytics,” Sallis said. “Once you’ve got that network and infrastructure in place, it’s going to be really easy to train an AI model and say, ‘I want you to look at all of these factors together and combine that information to give me a heads up as a safety professional when certain driver behaviors are trending toward unsafe behaviors that are going to have an impact on my safety scores.’”

Prince said carriers must always be looking to improve. Embracing tech-based tools is required to adopt that approach in today’s climate.

“You don’t have to be an early adopter, but paying attention to what’s out there on the market in terms of technology is going to be key to a company’s success,” Prince said. “We’ve got to get out of the mindset of doing things the way we’ve always done them just because we’ve always done them that way. You always want to be asking: ‘What else is there available that we can take advantage of that will be helpful?’”