This edition of Overdrive Radio touches on a area of long-well-founded concern for owner-operators. That’s the importance of, when possible, fighting the stains on the motor vehicle record that can come in the form of tickets for moving violations of all types. Pay the fine, and it’s like pleading guilty and doing the proverbial time. A "conviction” will be paid for in a myriad ways beyond just the cash fine: higher insurance rates, marks on your company’s CSA SMS profile and its scoring, possible audit hassles given more violations on the record mean greater likelihood of prioritization by federal or state investigators for an audit.

Yet there's another, relatively new way anyone with motor carrier authority could pay, too –- Jeff Davis, longtime Fleet Safety Services compliance consultant, who supports mostly small carriers in the event of an audit, outlines it here.

Last year, FMCSA modified its safety rating methodology, Davis said. For the first time auditors will be able to include traffic-ticket convictions in a carrier's overall safety rating. That’d be the Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory system long in place and which the agency is set to put up for ideas for improving this year: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15382419/fmcsa-to-key-in-on-problems-with-conditional-safety-rating-limbo

A public affairs spokesperson again confirmed that with me just this week, in fact, noting an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking requesting industry and public input on the safety rating remains for this year as a possibility.

With traffic-law convictions on the table during audits, Davis notes in the podcast, that’s even more for owner-operators and small fleet owners and managers to keep in mind in case an audit is likely.

And: Further incentive to manage those convictions, too, for any violation for which you or one of your drivers receive a citation – recall, too, that citations successfully adjudicated by a court can be removed from the data profile in the CSA SMS and the broader MCMIS database itself –- you use the DataQs system to do that: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15063812/how-to-dataq-to-challenge-a-violation

More resources on fighting tickets: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/14891468/fighting-tickets-how-owneroperators-succeed

Jeff Davis at Fleet Safety Services: https://www.fleetsafetyservices.com/