A small fleet whose owner I know well recently had a problem getting through to his ELD provider’s account reps about the return of hardware he wasn’t using, had been attempting to return for quite some time, and was still being charged for. I reached out to the ELD company’s press office with details of the situation, and within the span of a day the problem was resolved. Though a company with its shop in order might never have to triage a customer-service case after being contacted by an editor of a magazine, this one was illustrative at least of a service provider willing to do what’s right.
A different small fleet owner, Thomas Holland, is a retired law enforcement officer who lives out in the Los Angeles area. For the past few years, he’s grown a trucking company headquartered in Lancaster, California, Holland Logistics -- MC# 1143553, USDOT# 3482656. Last fall, brokers he used began giving him an unexpected piece of news -- according to a third-party lookup service those middlemen used to check a carrier’s authority, Holland Logistics was not authorized to carry property freight, they told him.
Yet then and now, Thomas Holland’s carrier authority in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Safer system database showed as follows, Holland said. That's right. Authorized.
The third-party lookup tool’s reps, Holland said, claimed any issue was FMCSA’s, stemming from a system outage in August of 2022 that required a reset of the federal system and the loss of a considerable amount of data. Yet when Holland reached out to FMCSA, he said, reps there told him what amounted to the opposite, that a private third party mining federal data and having issues of accuracy representing the reality within the federal system would seem to have issues of its own.
In efforts to see if I might be able to help Holland in his own efforts to resolve the discrepancy, I reached out to the third-party provider and to FMCSA about potential issues on their end. The provider dug its heels in, alternately denying there was a problem and then blaming FMCSA for it, while FMCSA insisted that data in its own system is accurate as to Holland Logistics' authority. Reps in the FMCSA public affairs office noted they would reach out in an attempt to work with the third party provider to get the issue resolved. I truly hope those efforts bear fruit, though Holland notes his experience with the third party to date doesn’t give him much hope.
It's worth noting: other third parties that carriers and insurance providers use (and which I have the capability to check), and some that brokers use, according to Holland, do not have the same problem representing Holland Logistics’ authority as it is, active.
