A recent easing of some requirements by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration appears to be a sign that the rollout of Motus, the agency’s new registration portal, continues to have problems.
The specific change disclosed this week by FMCSA is that the biennial update requirement that “all entities under its jurisdiction” update their information on file with the agency every two years has been “temporarily suspended.”
The suspension is for “entities that have not completed the required biennial update since June 1.”
The biennial update mandate, according to FMCSA, are that individuals and companies “are required to provide this update every two years even if your company has not changed its information, has ceased interstate operations since the last update, or is no longer in business and you did not notify FMCSA,” the agency says on its website in defining what that update requires.
Not to worry
Companies that have passed their due date for the biennial update since June 1 without being able to register “should not worry about inactivation resulting from Motus-related access or system issues,” FMCSA said.” Further guidance, the agency added, will be released “as recovery and stabilization efforts continue.”
The rollout of Motus that fully began May 14 had problems almost immediately.
“I think that the good news is that FMCSA has acknowledged that ‘recovery and stabilization’ is a thing that absolutely needs to happen,” P. Sean Garney, co-director of Scopelitis Transportation Consulting, said in an email to FreightWaves about the flexibility in the FMCSA registration requirement. His firm has been working with clients who have struggled with FMCSA access via Motus since its release.
Are things better?
Garney asked a rhetorical question: Has it gotten better?
“I’ve heard from some carriers that are gingerly moving through the process, getting hung up along the way, but passing through gates,” he said. “It’s just taking a while.”
But some of his clients, Garney said, are running into “conflicting information in various government systems that is absolutely resulting in carriers being unnecessarily unable to operate.”
FMCSA’s notice of the delay was not released as a newsroom item on the agency’s home page. It was published under its registration page.
FMCSA administrator Derek Barrs earlier this month released a statement about the Motus rollout that focused on its goals–“an extraordinary feat of heavy lifting that involved transferring more than three decades of data across multiple legacy systems to process millions of motor carriers into one unified powerhouse platform”–while mostly downplaying the technical problems that to at least some degree appears to be mostly still in place.
Barrs referred to them as “minor technical issues.”
Online community is buzzing
A social media post on the OwnerOperators subreddit of Reddit, from a poster named DOTDefenseTech, said the latest move by FMCSA “seems like a practical move.”
“A lot of carriers depend on USDOT status for normal business: authority checks, onboarding, insurance, factoring, broker setup, customer verification, etc.” the subreddit post said. “If the system is having access or record issues, inactivating carriers during the transition could create a mess for people who are trying to stay current but cannot get the system to work right.”
Website pops up to share stories and advice
The problems with the Motus rollout has spurred the creation of a website to share issues with individuals dealing with the system, and possibly find solutions: Stuck in Motus. (Its URL, however, refers to it as “stuck with Motus.”)
As the top of the page says: “Stuck in Motus? You’re not alone.”
The page is the creation of Mathieu Vag, the founder of HaulClaim, which is a service designed to help carriers with issues relating to detention. Vag said he got the idea for Stuck in Motus from his clients who were sharing tales of woe about dealing with the new system.
“Most of them were stuck, and they could not do anything,” Vag said in an interview with FreightWaves. “I was like, maybe if we should do something for the community where everyone can just put their problems out there and we can try to find solutions.”
Vag said interaction so far has been “pretty small,” but “the goal here is to show FMCSA that most of these guys are just stuck with no power at all.”
Nobody from FMCSA has reached out to him, Vag said.
The Stuck in Motus page has several dropdowns with advice on issues raised as a problem. Among them: “I can’t claim my company account”; “I lost or never had my USDOT pin”; “My new authority application is frozen mid-process.”
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