The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSRs) require that motor carriers review their drivers' motor vehicle records (MVRs), but the FMCSRs offer little guidance on how this should be carried out. Motor carriers need a means by which to measure and evaluate the safety record of an applicant or existing driver. Scoring drivers' MVRs is one such method.
Putting it down on paper
One of the first steps, when determining the safety standards that your carrier seeks in candidates and existing drivers, is put your criteria in your company's policies and procedures. Here are a few tips about policies and procedures to consider:
- Your safety managers and driver recruiters (who review the drivers' driving records) must strictly adhere to the standards you have set up.
- If you have numerous locations, each must follow your corporate standards.
If a policy is not enforced consistently, it will lose its power, plus you will be opening your carrier up to potential lawsuits. For instance, if a driver is denied employment or is terminated because of a traffic conviction, and another driver has no repercussions for a similar offense, you have just violated fair hiring practices.
Setting the bar
Before developing the scoring process of MVRs, you will need to answer the following questions:
- What do you consider the most severe traffic offenses? These would have the greatest assessed point value. Gauge all of your lesser violations on how heavily you weighed the most severe incidents.
- What do you consider somewhat severe traffic offenses? These would have points assessed in the middle ground. Assess the point system to match proportionally with the most severe offenses and the least severe.
- What offenses are seen as least severe? They will have the least points assessed. Assess the point system to match proportionally with the most severe offenses and somewhat severe offenses.
- Are there offenses that will be assessed zero or one point?
An example might be 12 points assessed for each violation under the most severe category, 6 for somewhat, and 3 for least severe. Or you could use 6, 4, 2; 5, 3, 1; or any other combination you feel appropriate.
You should use your state's MVR codes as a skeleton, rating each offense based on your assessed point system.
You will also need to determine the maximum accumulation of points within a set time frame that will be held against a driver. Will you examine a 3-year period or expand the time to include offenses occurring with the last five years, as many insurance carriers do?
You will also have to determine how you are going to calculate an accident that results in a citation. Will you count the accident and violation as one disqualifying incident, taking the higher of the two points, or add the two together as individual disqualifiers?
Source: JJ Keller