Department of Transportation issued an alert regarding another round of fraudulent letters sent to current and potential DOT contractors requesting banking account information in order to be eligible for contract offerings. DOT says it does not require any confidential information to verify registration. For more information, go to this site.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to work with the U.S. Border Patrol in the âTexas Hold âEmâ initiative to revoke the commercial driver licenses of truckers who knowingly smuggle illegal weapons, drugs or humans across the Texas-Mexico border.
The American Transportation Research Institute said the latest version of its idling regulations compendium and cab card for drivers includes new idling regulations in Florida, Maine and South Carolina. The compendium and cab card are available on ATRIâs website.
Mustafa Redzic, owner of Bosna Truck Driving School in Missouri, was sentenced June 16 in federal court to 75 months imprisonment and 36 months supervised release for his involvement in a scheme involving fraudulent commercial driversâ license testing. The Department of Transportationâs Inspector Generalâs Office says in early 2004, Redzic and state driverâs license examiner Tony Parr devised a scheme whereby Redzic would send customers to Parrâs testing facility for abbreviated CDL tests. More than 600 student drivers were licensed under the scheme in a 15-month period.
Q How does a small broker or carrier protect itself against vicarious liability when tendering freight to an outside carrier?
A Vicarious liability remains one of the most troubling issues facing intermediaries in transportation. When small undercapitalized motor carriers with only $1 million in insurance are involved in crashes that cause significant injuries, plaintiffs lawyers often try to reach deep pockets up the supply chain by naming the intermediary or the shipper as a party defendant. These attorneys rely on vicarious liability and state law theories such as negligent hiring, assumption of duty, joint venture or agent/principal theories.
The case law is mixed at best, and judges tend to let the issue go to the jury unless they can find as a matter of law that there is no issue of fact upon which a reasonable man could find for the plaintiff.
There is no easy vaccination that can inoculate an intermediary against a finding of vicarious liability, but some of the cases are instructive in showing what you should avoid. All too frequently, to satisfy shipper demands, intermediaries agree to assume carrier-like duties and accept the role of a âservice provider.â Assuming such carrier-like duties can lead to factual disputes with adverse consequences over the role of the intermediary as a âpure brokerâ or âarrangerâ of transportation. The recent decision in Jones v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc. (2008 U.S. Dist. Lexis 45325; W.D. Va. June 10, 2008) again confirms, I believe, that the best practice is for a âthird-party logisticianâ to define its role clearly as that of a property broker who agrees to retain a carrier that is âlicensed, authorized and insuredâ in accordance with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations.
Regulations prohibit brokers from representing themselves as carriers. The common but mistaken practice of naming the broker as the carrier on the bill of lading at time of pickup only confuses the brokerâs actual role in the transaction and makes it more likely that an injured party will name it as defendant in a lawsuit.
At the urging of plaintiffâs bar, I think that the courts have misapplied the federal safety regulations to infer wrongly that a shipper or intermediary has some obligation to second-guess the Department of Transportation when choosing a carrier. Congress has imposed a pervasive scheme of safety regulations for determining whether a carrier is fit, willing and able. The safety regulations impose a nondelegable duty on the carrier â and the carrier alone â to ensure compliance with hours of service, drug testing, equipment maintenance, etc. FMCSA uses the SafeStat system, among other tools, to determine when to audit a carrier. DOT has sole responsibility for determining when a carrier is safe for the public to use.
The comprehensive federal statutes and safety regulations should be found to preempt and trump state law where the issue is confined to carrier selection. (See article entitled âA Different Point of View,â www.transportationlaw.net/pdf/different_point_of_view-in_transit11-07.pdf).
The suggestions by the plaintiffs barâs experts that shippers or brokers should examine SafeStat to rule out carriers that DOT otherwise finds fit to operate is an implausible and unworkable standard that would kill transactional brokerage and deprive small carriers of backhauls in the spot market. SafeStat was not intended for that purpose, as the caveats on the public website clearly indicate, and second-guessing the agency should not be required.
At the end of the day, motor carriers are highly regulated public utilities, and the âshipping publicâ (i.e., shippers, brokers and other carriers) â just like the âtraveling publicâ â should be allowed to rely upon DOTâs determination of fitness.
In this regard, in 2010, FMCSA will replace the current SafeStat program with a more complex continuing compliance system. Clearly, this new program, from what I am seeing, will defy third-party analysis of a carrierâs continuing safety compliance.
It is time for everyone in the supply chain to insist that the federal safety regulations preempt state law and seek statutory confirmation of this fact.
