Why Do We Still Have 1600+ Unregistered Carriers

Unregistered Carriers on 11/14/2009 - 1626
Unregistered Carriers on 11/16/2009 - 1646

Maine - 93.17%
Illinois - 92.26%

When I can pull myself away from "War Games", I tend to reflect on why we (Illinois) still have over 1600 unregistered carriers. While I believe we have done extremely well, I still think that's a huge number. The answer, quite frankly, is that I don't really know the whole answer. As the dad said in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, "so there you have it!" (He also said that Windex fixes everything, but it hasn't worked on registration percentage yet.)

Here's what I DO know:

About 400 of these are USDOT numbers issued since January 1 that have not yet registered. Many of them are "in process" - in fact, 20 of them came to our attention for the first time this morning.

Some percentage of them - a small percentage, I think - are guys who are in the "boonies" and who pretty much refuse to register and probably won't get caught.

Some percentage of them - again, a small percentage, I think - are guys for whom we have bad addresses, but they appear to be active when we do our due diligence.

Some percentage of them - maybe another 10% - are really inactive carriers that we haven't deactivated yet.

Some percentage of them - probably a small percentage, at this point - are bad MCMIS records.

Believe it or not, we still make a fair number of contacts where the carriers say, "This is the first I've heard of this." Kathy maintains that this group is primarily private carriers with old numbers. Many of them end up registering, but, for the moment, they are still "in process".

Beyond that, I'm still searching for answers.

One thing we have learned is that you can register 90+% of them, but the other few percent can still be quite elusive.

No matter - I'm still trying to "get to zero"! I may not get all the way there without ultimately having a SWAT team trained on the last holdout in a small farm house somewhere in the boonies! News at 11!

I'm JUST KIDDING about that last part - hopefully, we can avoid that unpleasantry!