MCMIS, UCR and More! - Part 1

Unregistered Carriers on 02/04/2009 - 971
Unregistered Carriers on 02/06/2010 - 950

Illinois - 95.60%
Maine - 93.40%

Those of you who are new to this blog have missed some of the earlier posts which described the relationship between the Unified Carrier Registration (UCR) and the FMCSA's Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS). We can all stand a review once in a while, so I'm going to begin a multi-part series that describes, from my own point of view, the relationship between MCMIS and UCR ... and then offer a few observations about the future of that relationship --- at no extra cost!

Let's start by explaining how MCMIS got connected with UCR.

The UCR program registers interstate motor carriers, brokers and freight forwarders. For the sake of simplicity, I will heretofore refer to this entire group as "carriers".

When the UCR Board was trying to figure out about how many carriers were currently in operation (in order to determine first-year fees), the Board quickly reached concensus that the most comprehensive source of entities fitting the federal definition of "interstate commercial motor carrier" was MCMIS. IRP and IFTA were considered, but since their definition of carrier starts at 26,000 pounds - and they don't include brokers or freight forwarders - and their definition of "interstate" is considerably different - they were not considered comprehensive enough by the Board. After all, the more potential carriers we could identify, the lower the fees could be set.

The Board's next task was to use MCMIS to figure out 1) who was likely to actually register under UCR and 2) about how many vehicles those carriers would register.

After much deliberation by the Board's Revenue and Fees Committee, the Board adopted the recommendation that a "UCR Universe" Carrier would be a carrier designated in MCMIS as an "Active, Interstate Carrier" with some level of activity - an inspection, a crash, or an MCS-150 update - within the past 12 months.

This set of criteria produced a "Universe" of approximately 350,000 MCMIS records which the States would actively solicit for UCR registration.

This set of criteria also "left behind" literally tens of thousands of MCMIS records that were designated as "Active, Interstate Carriers" that did not have the aforementioned activity in the last 12 months. We'll talk a lot more about this group in the next few days.

Have a great weekend!