The Truth About DataQ

Welcome to CSA Basics.

CSA Basics.

The podcast where we talk about all things related to safety, compliance, and insurance for the trucking industry. We're here to help you save money, save time, and save lives. Now, here's your host, CEO of Carrier Risk Solutions, Sam Tucker.

All right, folks. Welcome back to the CSA Basics Podcast. I'm your host, Sam Tucker. Today, just wanted to chat for a little while about something a lot of our clients and prospects have been asking us about, and that is data queue challenges. So a lot of you may not be quite clear about what data queue challenges are, how they can impact your SMS score. your CSA Basics course, and how you can best take advantage of this program. So I just wanted to take a few minutes today to set a couple things straight, lay out how these DataQ challenges work, and how they can benefit your fleet. All right, so let's just start off by saying exactly what is a DataQ. So a DataQ request is a request for a motor carrier or driver or one of the FMCSA or FMCSA state partners to go in and if they feel that any information the FMCSA has about them is either incomplete or incorrect, this DataQ system gives those folks the opportunity to go in and ask for that information to be reviewed. So generally speaking, that requires whoever's asking for the review to be done, they have to specify exactly which report they're talking about, whether it be a PSP report from the driver's perspective Or basic score information from a roadside inspection, those kind of things as well. The other thing that you have to have apart from that information regarding that specific report is you wanna have some sort of evidence. So, because essentially what you're doing here is you're saying, you have this piece of information about me, say for instance, it's from a roadside inspection, and you believe it's incorrect. So for instance, there could be any number of things that you might think are incorrect about the specific inspection or the violation that was cited during that inspection. So this is your opportunity to say, hey, I think this is inaccurate or incomplete, And here's why. So that's the point where the motor carrier or the driver can go in and say, here's the information, here's where I feel like the officer may have made a mistake in applying the regulations, or some other information about was incomplete. So to put it another way too, I mean, this is essentially not necessarily saying that the officer who pulled the driver over or did complete the inspection was lying about something or did something necessarily wrong when they're executing their duties, but sometimes mistakes just happen. You know, officers are humans just like everybody else. Sometimes they make mistakes, and the data queue process gives you the perfect opportunity to go back and try to fix those mistakes that may have occurred at the roadside. But with that being said too, it's always important to understand that again, this is kind of like you're telling that the officer did his job incorrectly or that there may be something inaccurately applied. So There's always a little bit of sensitivity that has to be encountered when you're doing that, and it's important that you do that very tactfully with those folks. So I won't go into the actual mechanics of filling out a DataQ request or those kind of things. It's really simple to access that information. The FMCSA has a great DataQ website, has lots of good information on there, and maybe someday we'll go in and take care of some of that too. But if you're looking at your CSA basic scores on your SMS or your Safety Measurement System, If you go down to the bottom right-hand corner, it says request a data review. You can click that button, it will take you directly to the DataQ site, or you can just go to Google too, or any of your other internet search engines, and just type in FMCSA DataQ or what is a DataQ. It will take you to the FMCSA's website on this too. So what happens once you fill out that DataQ request is that request is automatically forwarded back to the state agency that issued that citation or issued that report. So if it's a roadside inspection, for instance, and it was issued in the state of Georgia, then that roadside That data queue will be sent back to the state of Georgia to handle. So they'll assign it out to the specific state, and the state will be responsible for getting the officer who issued the citation to review it, as well as their management team, and then respond back given the situation. And what I mean by respond back is essentially what you have to do is you have to prove your case. So you have to go out there and say, hey, here's the information, here's what we think was inaccurate or incomplete. Here's the evidence we have to support our point of view, saying that this is not accurate or this was not complete, and here's what we want to do to try to fix that. So it's not really an opportunity for the motor carrier or driver to come back and say, "Hey, you know we fixed everything that you guys found. Can you go ahead and take it off our our scores? You know, kind of a mea culpa kind of thing. Please don't charge us with this unless let's fix this." Or hey, we got a fix. We want to have it reviewed. It doesn't really work like that. That's not really what data cues are. It was really to go back and, like I said previously, it's really to go back and try to fix either incomplete or incorrect information, or if the officer made a mistake, this is a good opportunity for the motor carrier or driver to remedy that mistake at this time. So a big myth that we run into is that the data queue process is kind of an end-all be-all silver bullet. So given what I just said about the data queue process and exactly what it is, I think you can understand pretty clearly that it's not a silver bullet. You know, from our experience and from the folks we talk to on a regular basis, we find that if you get a 20 to 25% hit ratio, meaning that if you, if you get 20 to 25% of your, your RDRs, your requests for data reviews, approved or to come back as a data correction, then you're way ahead of the game or doing pretty well. So with that being said, if you're looking for DataQ Process to go ahead and take care of a lot of these issues that you may be having on your CSA scores, I wouldn't look for that to be that, like I said earlier, that silver bullet. It really isn't going to help you that much given the situation and that pretty low approval rate. It may be higher, maybe lower, but just like I said, from our experience, 20 to 25% of these are approved on any given case. Something else to think about too when you're considering which violations you should try to seek a data cue on, essentially the things like hours of service violations, and unsafe driving violations, those are gonna be pretty much no-gos from the start. It's gonna be really hard to try to fight the officer saying your driver was going over 15 miles an hour, and you come back with something completely different. That could be possible, but those are definitely uphill battles. So hours in service and unsafe driving are pretty tough to get approved in any situation. So we consider those basically no-gos from the start. Vehicle maintenance violations, since those are the regulations around vehicle maintenance and the violations that are issued with those are a little more vague for the most part, so we have the opportunity, we find, to be, you know, find a lot more flexibility around those specific violations instead of the others. So for instance, I mean, trying to fight again a 15-mile-an-hour-plus speed violation on a debt-equity process Might be a very, very tough road to plow, but if you want to assert that the hose, if you had a hose, a brake hose or tubing chafe violation received, the degree of that chafing could be up for debate a little more than not. So things like that, like I said, for vehicle maintenance, it's a lot easier to get those approved comparatively speaking to hours of service or unsafe driving. So that's just our point of view. All right, so that pretty much wraps up what I want to talk about today. That's the basics of the data queue process and kind of our take on how effective these are in trying to fix your SMS scores. And just to recap a little bit too, these aren't a silver bullet. You know, 20 to 25% on a good day are approved. So it's essentially like telling a DOT officer or law enforcement officer they're not doing their jobs correctly, or they may have made mistakes. So it's really just trying to Fix incomplete, inaccurate, or incorrect information that may be found on a PSP report or on a roadside inspection. And again, to basically hours of service violations, unsafe driving violations, we tend to consider those as no-gos. Vehicle maintenance violations, those are a little more up in the air and are a little bit easier to get approved. All right, so with that being said, there are some actual exceptions to that general rule. There's a few different instances of places where data queue processes are really successful. And if you join us on our next podcast episode, we're going to check those out and go into a little more detail about those. And specifically, that's if a driver's convicted of a different charge, if they're hauling under COVID exemption, which is going on currently, or if it's a crash that's involved in the Crash Preventability Determination Program, or the CPDP. So on our next episode, we'll hit on those 3 things. And give you a little more information about each of those. We really appreciate your time and taking a few minutes out of your busy day to listen to what we're working on and talking about. We appreciate you. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe to our podcast. Listen anywhere that you listen to podcasts currently, and please tell your friends. We'd love as many people to subscribe and to listen to us as possible. We're just trying to do the best we can to help everybody else out. If you have any questions or need any help from us, you can give us a call at 1-855-211-5550 or hit us up at mysafetymanager.com. It's just mysafetymanager.com. Thanks again for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the CSA Basics Podcast. Please rate and subscribe to make sure you receive all of our future episodes. Also, be sure to check out www.csabasics.com. csabasics.com for more great ways to help improve your fleet safety and DOT compliance programs. See you next time on the CSA Basics Podcast.