WASHINGTON — Following a high-profile deadly truck crash in Indiana last week that uncovered a network of fraudulent trucking companies, legislation has been introduced in Congress to give the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration authority to use artificial intelligence to track them down.
Introduced on Thursday by Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., the bill directs the FMCSA administrator “to conduct a study on chameleon carriers in the United States and plan, develop, and test an advanced automation tool to help enforcement personnel detect chameleon carrier applications under the registration process of the Department of Transportation, and for other purposes,” according to the bill’s summary.
The official text of the legislation has not yet been published, but Hageman’s bill, according to Dallas TV station WFAA, “directs federal regulators to finally determine how widespread chameleon carriers are, and how many deaths, catastrophic injuries, and crashes have been tied to them.
“It would require the comptroller general to report back to Congress within one year,” WFAA’s report noted, and would direct FMCSA “to build an automated screening system designed to catch carriers trying to game the system before they’re cleared to haul freight again.”
Last week FMCSA began investigating the Indiana crash, in which four people were killed, after it was revealed that the driver of the truck was “an illegal trucker,” according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, writing in a social media post.
The driver’s company was part of a network of carriers that “have all the markings of fraud and are accused of being chameleon carriers,” Duffy said. “This is when companies swap names and DOT numbers to avoid enforcement.”
Citing the same crash, U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., earlier this week launched a tipline for truckers and others in the trucking industry “to share concerns about carriers employing or contracting with drivers who are not legally in the United States, who are not authorized to drive a truck, or who cannot meet required English-language safety standards,” Banks stated.
“The TruckSafe Tipline gives people on the ground a way to speak up when they see carriers cutting corners and putting lives at risk.”
Rob Carpenter, an independent writer for FreightWaves and a regulatory compliance consultant, points out that identifying a chameleon carrier is not just a matter of looking for shared addresses in government databases.
“A chameleon carrier operation is about concealment,” Carpenter wrote in a FreightWaves article last week. “It’s about constructing a network of entities designed to evade regulatory detection and enforcement.”
The “connective tissue,” he said, can be any combination of a long list of identifiable information, including shared Vehicle Identification Numbers moving between authorities, common officers or registered agents across multiple DOT numbers, and identical or overlapping phone numbers and email addresses.
In the network implicated in the Indiana crash, “we found all of those indicators.”
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