Different UCR Approaches - Part 5

Unregistered Carriers on 10/26/2009 - 1873
Unregistered Carriers on 10/27/2009 - 1829

WE’LL REGISTER ALL MCMIS ACTIVE INTERSTATE CARRIERS

Yesterday, we talked about registering the UCR Universe List. Today, we're talking about registering all MCMIS active interstate carriers? What's the difference? It's simple - and huge! The difference is that crazy little one-year activity filter we discussed.

In order to be in the UCR Universe, a carrier not only has to be an "active interstate carrier", but they also have to have an inspection, a crash, an MCS-150 update or a UCR registration in the past 12 months.

When you take away the one-year filter, you now have a whole bunch of MCMIS carrier records that show active interstate carriers, but carriers that show no activity within the last year. And there are a lot of 'em! In Illinois, we have about 20,000 Universe carriers - and about 10,000 more carriers without any activity in the past year!

These "unfiltered" carrier records represent several different possibilities:

1) They may indeed be active interstate carriers who have essentially been operating under the FMCSA radar.

2) They may be companies that are no longer in business but which were never "de-activated" by the Feds.

3) They may be carrier records that are mis-classified.

I'm sure there are other possibilities. The important thing to consider about pursuing these records is that they represent a much lower likelihood of UCR registration precisely because they have no activity in the past year.

The Feds would love for a State to pursue these carriers in order to clarify the status of these records. Our experience to date, unfortunately, has been that we end up de-activating far more of them than we end up registering. So, while we don't consider the effort to have been wasted, we find it's far less productive to pursue this group than to spend our time pursuing the UCR Universe carriers.