The Board of Directors for American Trucking Associations called on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to make changes to its Compliance, Safety, Accountability system, better known as CSA.


"From the outset, ATA has supported FMCSA's efforts to improve its enforcement capabilities through CSA," ATA President and CEO Bill Graves says. "Through CSA's development and implementation the agency had been responsive to suggestions and made an effort to improve the program as needed. However, recently our members have become concerned that the agency has become increasingly unresponsive, even in the face of data and logic."

ATA says it wants to address the unreliability of CSA scores, the loose or, at times, inverse connection to crash risk, as well as FMCSA's unwillingness to frankly discuss the program's weaknesses.

Among the issues ATA has identified for reform are: crash accountability, a lack of research proving increased crash risk for all of CSA's various violation categories and the publication of carriers' scores in those categories.