A compliance review can be scary, but safety departments can prevail through careful and precise documentation and by being cooperative.

It may not be a trucking company’s biggest worry, but for the safety director, a compliance review probably ranks second only to a catastrophic accident. The stress is high, and the consequences are severe. Everyone in the company – especially the owners and officers – should be concerned. A carrier can face substantial civil penalties for violations of safety regulations or even for poor documentation of its compliance.

A rating other than satisfactory also can damage a carrier’s reputation and even disqualify it for business with some customers. And regulations the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration adopted a few years ago call for the agency to shut down a carrier that fails to improve upon an unsatisfactory rating within a reasonable period of time.

Surviving a compliance review requires thorough and ongoing attention to detail. Usually, it’s lack of proper documentation or adequate management controls – not willful disregard of the law – that trips up a carrier in a compliance review. Success or failure generally will be decided long before the auditor actually arrives.

Avoiding the audit
The best way to survive an audit is to never draw one. That’s not always within your control, but careful monitoring of your safety performance will help you respond promptly to problems that, left uncorrected, will make you a target of a compliance review down the road.

Although a driver complaint or dramatic, headline-grabbing crash, such as the major tanker accident on I-95 in January, can trigger a compliance review at any time, the principal

Compliance Reviews
by Carrier Size (Power Units)
1998-2002