Register for the CVSA Annual Conference and Exhibition, which will be held Sept. 20-24, in Orlando, Florida, at the Hyatt Regency Orlando. This premier meeting offers the opportunity for government officials, enforcement and industry to collaborate and affect meaningful changes and improvements to the overall culture of commercial motor vehicle (CMV) safety throughout North America.
ason McDaniel
Key Highlights
2037985262 | Adobe Stock
The GHOSTRUCK Act, supported by NTTC and other trucking organizations, seeks to close loopholes allowing foreign-based personnel to manipulate electronic logging device records, thereby enhancing highway safety and driver accountability.
National Tank Truck Carriers supports the GHOSTRUCK Act—the new bipartisan “Guarding Hours-of-Service Oversight and Stopping Tampering by Remote Unofficial Carrier Keeper” legislation designed to strengthen the integrity of electronic logging device (ELD) records and improve highway safety by closing a loophole that allows foreign-based personnel to manipulate driver logs.
The GHOSTRUCK Act was introduced by U.S. Representatives Greg Steube (R-Fla.) and Dave Taylor (R-Ohio).
Ryan Streblow, NTTC president and CEO of NTTC, emphasized the critical nature of the bill for the tank truck industry.
“Safety is at the heart of everything we do at National Tank Truck Carriers,” Streblow said in a news release. “The GHOSTRUCK Act strengthens the integrity of the hours-of-service system by ensuring that edits to electronic logging device records are made only by authorized personnel physically located in North America and remain subject to driver approval.
“Accountability in driver records is essential to maintaining compliance, protecting drivers from undue pressure, and ensuring that commercial motor vehicles operate safely on our nation’s highways.”
According to a report from Bulk Transporter’s affiliate publication, FleetOwner, the legislation addresses growing concerns that overseas dispatchers are altering driver logs while remaining beyond the reach of U.S. accountability and enforcement measures. Current federal law does not explicitly prohibit foreign-based personnel from editing or annotating these records, a gap that proponents say allows for the falsification of logs and the overworking of drivers.
The GHOSTRUCK Act would mandate that any edits or annotations to an ELD record be made only by a carrier, dispatcher, or driver physically located in North America. Critically, the bill preserves the requirement that all edits remain subject to driver approval, ensuring the driver maintains final say over their record of duty status.
Steube noted that the act is necessary because foreign actors have been found falsifying driver logs to avoid accountability when tragedies occur on American roads. Beyond NTTC, the bill has garnered broad industry support from other trucking organizations, including American Trucking Associations, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, and the Truckload Carriers Association.
“Foreign dispatchers should not be able to manipulate trucking safety records from halfway around the world and put American lives at risk,” Steube said in a release. “Reports have exposed how overseas actors are falsifying driver logs, overworking truckers beyond safe limits, and avoiding accountability when tragedies occur.
“The GHOSTRUCK Act closes this loophole and helps keep our roads safe.”
Alex Lockie
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has released new guidance on what to do about drivers being coerced into violating safety regulations as the agency cracks down on electronic logging device providers.
The new guidance, in the form of a question-and-answer document, lays out clearly what coercion is, and what drivers can do about it.
Entitled “FAQs: Prohibited Coercion of CMV Drivers,” the document was issued in late April “to help drivers understand how they might be coerced to violate safety regulations and what they can do if they believe they have been coerced.”
FMCSA released the FAQ just a little over two weeks after the Super Ego chameleon carrier story made a splash in the mainstream news.
There’s plenty of stories out there of freight fraud, bad broker behavior and skimping driver pay, but the Super Ego network’s story stands out in that drivers allegedly were coerced into driving well past legal hours limits with ELDs manipulated, with company direction.
ELD/hours of service cheating is illegal for drivers, period, even if a fleet or other party twists an arm or two, or designs a lease system that demands an impossible number of miles to make ends meet.
Roadcheck, upcoming next week, will take a special look at such manipulation and the HOS violations it produces.
FMCSA’s new FAQ specifically mentions drivers being coerced into falsifying logs or driving beyond hours limitations.
Overdrive recently published a driver’s testimony, complete with video evidence alleging Prime Route, a carrier in Super Ego’s chameleon network, had drivers cheat on their hours with company manipulation of their ELDs. The driver, participating in the Return to Duty program after a failed drug test, felt he had no choice but to run illegally.
Prime Route has since denied any wrongdoing, but without providing specifics.
What FMCSA is saying about the Coercion Rule (49 CFR 390.6)
FMCSA’s new guidance says the “coercion rule”, 49 CFR 390.6, “is designed to protect commercial motor vehicle drivers from being pressured to violate the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSRs) by motor carriers, shippers, receivers, and transportation intermediaries (brokers) and their agents, officers, or representatives.”
The agency gives the examples of drivers being pressured to run over hours limits, to falsify logs, speed, run unsafe equipment with known out-of-service defects, move overweight loads, or run when the driver is sick or has been drinking.
The regulatory definition of “coercion” in 49 CFR 390.5T specifically apply to brokers, too, featuring this part: “a threat to withhold business, employment, or work opportunities from a driver, a threat to take or permit adverse employment action against a driver, or actually taking any of these actions against a driver, which is done in order to induce the driver to take an action that would violate the FMCSRs or punish the driver for refusing to violate the FMCSRs.”
FMCSA gives the following example of how coercion might play out in sequence.
Drivers filing a coercion complaint will need to set out the facts of how the coercion occurred.
While the coercion rules can apply to brokers or even shippers, they especially apply to employers. Employers “are prohibited from withholding business, employment or work opportunities from a driver, taking or permitting any adverse employment action against a driver, or threatening to” do so.
If a carrier does threatens to fire, deny future loads, reduce miles, cut pay or bonuses, impose fines, assign less-desirable routes or no loads at all, or even deliberately damaging a driver’s reputation, that’s all actionable, FMCSA wrote.
What drivers can do about coercion
“Coercion occurs the moment a threat is made,” FMCSA wrote. “The driver does not actually have to commit the violation for coercion to have occurred.”
Simply threatening a driver counts as a violation, or even punishing a driver for not committing a violation of FMCSR counts too.
In those cases, FMCSA advises the drivers keep detailed records such as copies of ELD messages, texts or emails. Drivers can even write up their own account of what happened “while it is fresh in his or her memory” and email it to themselves to have a timestamp.
Next, file a complaint with FMCSA.
“A written complaint must be filed within 90 calendar days of the incident and must be submitted to the National Consumer Complaint Database (NCCDB) or the FMCSA Division Administrator for the State where the driver is employed,” FMCSA wrote.
Drivers can call 1-888-DOT-SAFT (1-888-368-7238) as well.
Make sure to include the following info:
For more info, call the FMCSA Information Line, 1-800-832-5660 or read the FAQ directly.
Truck driver log falsification violations can lead to out-of-service orders, fines, bad federal safety scores, failed DOT audits, civil penalties, even nuclear verdicts. What can motor carriers do?
Deborah Lockridge
Log falsifications were the fourth most common driver-related violation discovered in roadside commercial vehicle inspections from 2019 to 2023. And they’re the second most common violation discovered in compliance reviews of motor carriers. Brandon Wiseman, president of Trucksafe Consulting, explains why — and what trucking companies can do about it — in this episode of HDT Talks Trucking. Click on Link below to see video.
Click on link below to see video.
NTSB report finds fake driver logs contributed to Triton Logistics crash that killed 3
John Gallagher
WASHNGTON — Safety investigators have warned the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to tighten electronic logging device (ELD) requirements to prevent trucking companies and their drivers from creating fake driver hours-of-service (HOS) logs.
The recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board was included in a crash report issued on Wednesday concluding that truck driver fatigue, due to excessive driving time and limited opportunity to sleep, was the probable cause of a December 2022 crash on I-64 in Virginia in which the truck driver rammed the back of medium-size bus, killing three people.
“Contributing to the truck driver’s fatigue was the motor carrier, Triton Logistics Incorporated, which created fictitious driver accounts in the electronic logging device system and enabled drivers to operate their vehicles for hours in excess of federal regulations,” the NTSB stated.
Over the course of the 20-month investigation, the NTSB found that management of the Romeoville, Illinois-based trucking company would instruct drivers to manipulate ELD driver logs when they exceeded their federal drive-time limits.
“Specifically, the drivers would call in to the carrier’s HOS department by cell phone and the carrier would log them into the alternate driver account, which allowed them to continue driving under a false account and circumvent the HOS regulations,” the NTSB report stated.
Daniel Cramer, 61, the driver of the truck involved in the crash, described to investigators the existence of a data center in Lithuania “that Triton used to manage — and when needed, manipulate — drivers’ electronic logs to make it look like they had more time for rest than they really did,” according to WAVY.com reporting in March.
In the days leading up to the crash, Cramer had exceeded FMCSA’s 14-hour driving window four times and the 11-hour driving limit three times. He had also exceeded the 70-hour rule by more than 4 hours in a period of 7 consecutive days.
“Also, because drivers were paid by the mile, they were financially incentivized to exceed their HOS limits because it allowed them to drive farther and earn more money,” NTSB stated.
The agency noted that Triton’s chief executive officer and the HOS manager denied knowing about fictitious logins. The company did not respond to phone calls by FreightWaves seeking comment on the report’s findings.
After an on-site focused review conducted of Triton after the crash, FMCSA found violations that included making, or permitting a driver to make, a false report regarding their duty status and allowing a driver to exceed HOS limits.
FMCSA fined Triton $36,170 for those violations along with failure to conduct post-crash alcohol testing. It also assigned Triton a “conditional” safety rating, which means a carrier does not have adequate safety management controls in place to ensure compliance with the safety fitness standards.
As a result of the investigation, NTSB recommended that FMCSA revise ELD requirements to require that ELD providers create an audit log that includes:
Other recommendations include:
NTSB also reiterated two previous recommendations:
(This false log method does not require spoofing or jamming. Just adding the ghost driver and lying to the MCSAP inspector.)
