Big News:  I have seen an increase of the number of DOT Compliance Reviews lately, and nearly half of which end up with an Unsatisfactory safety rating, for no good reason.  A Difference Between Satisfactory & Unsatisfactory.

One of the main reasons companies are assigned an overall rating of Unsatisfactory is because of Factor six of the audit being unsatisfactory. 

You see, factor six of the audit is basically an accident ratio, in which the DOT will take the number of DOT Recordable accidents your company was involved in over the past twelve months or the last calendar year.  They will multiply this number by 1,000,000, and then divide that number by your actual fleet mileage of those commercial motor vehicles in your fleet. 

For example:  If you have had 6 accidnets in 2007, but only 4 were determined to be DOT Recordable, then they would use 4 in the formula.  Therefore 4 X 1,000,000 = 4,000,000.  Then let's say that your mileage for your total fleet for 2007 was 1,350,000.  They would divide 4,000,000 by the 1,350,000, which comes to 2.96%.  This is Unsatisfactory.  As a matter of fact anything above 1.5 is Unsatisfactory.

NOW, Here is what I have seen just recently; A company was going through the compliance review (audit), in which the officer asked for the total fleet mileage for 2007.  The company went to their IFTA records to pull up the mileage, in order to provide it to the officer.  The officer took the mileage, entered it into the software program which calculated the rating as Unsatisfactory because of the number of accidents.  This was not realized until they had asked me to help them get their Satisfactory rating back after the audit. 

THE PROBLEM is that they, in fact, did NOT provide the officer with the total fleet miles, BUT RATHER, Only the miles in which they turned in for IFTA, which was around 1,500,000.  They had an additional 3,500,000 miles that they did not turn in because they did not know that they were supposed to add the miles that their Owner/Operators turned in to IFTA.

This caused their accident ratio to be at 5.8% rather than only 1.3%, a difference between Satisfactory and Unsatisfactory!

It is a very wise decision to have representation present during your audit.  I'm not talking about a lwayer.......I'm talking about a DOT Compliance / Fleet Safety Expert.  It isn't free, and isn't cheap, but it is a very valuable service.  We could have kept this company in business, where as right now.......they are shut down.