Commercial Carriers have a legal responsibility to maintain an accurate record of their drivers’ convictions of applicable safety laws, administrative penalties, and collisions that are required to be reported to the government. In Alberta, this is enforced through Section 41 of the Commercial Vehicle Certificate and Insurance Regulation (quoted below). How do Carriers manage to accomplish this requirement? In our experience, many carriers rely on annual Driver Abstracts or the Carrier Profile to maintain this information… However this is a lagging indicator. You don’t want to find out about a DUI in several months when you pull the Driver Abstract. Similarly, you don’t want to wait just as long to find out your driver has several speeding tickets, their licence demerits are high, and insurance companies might have issues with the driver at renewal time. With this potential lag in information flow, it’s incredibly important to have a process in place to ensure drivers can report their applicable items, a system to track those reports, and ensure that the history can be traced in the event of an audit.

Driver’s Initial Report

For reasons outlined above, it’s important that carriers receive timely reports from their drivers when an applicable Collision, Inspection, or Conviction has occurred. There are some really easy ways to accomplish this. Carriers can manage this requirement by having the driver e-mail in a written record of the infraction or complete an internal report form. The report will then be received by the Carrier and reviewed for accuracy. Then it must be stored in the applicable driver file (electronic or paper copy are both acceptable).

ComplianceBox was designed to manage this requirement in a way that makes it easy for drivers, managers/supervisors, and auditors alike. From the mobile app, drivers can effortlessly report Collisions, Convictions, and CVSA inspections. Once a report has been made, company administrators receive an alert to review the information.

Progressive Disciplinary Program

Now that you have received a copy of the drivers report, what do you do? Again, Alberta regulations require a carrier to maintain a written Company Safety Program which includes policies and procedures on driver/employee conduct and discipline. The regulation is not specific enough to require a carrier to perform specific disciplinary actions based off of the type or number of violations, so the Carrier is required to make this determination on their own. However, numerous infractions can lead to damage to the Carrier Profile, increased rates or difficulty getting insurance, or even a serious legal liability. For example, if a driver has a history of speeding tickets and is then involved in a collision that is attributed to the driver speeding, the Carrier could be open to being involved in civil or criminal litigation.

ComplianceBox manages this by providing company administrators/supervisors the ability to enter in applicable comments that get pushed back to the drivers mobile application for them to review.

Comparing to Carrier Profile / Abstracts

Managing the Carrier Profile and Driver Abstracts are still both a legal requirement and an important measure to ensure compliance with your carriers procedures to report all collisions, convictions, and CVSA inspections. Each Abstract and Carrier Profile should be cross-referenced with each item that has been reported to the Carrier. In addition to being time consuming, managing these processes manually can lead to errors in entering information and/or attaching appropriate documentation.

Alternatively, you might find an infraction that a driver failed to report to the carrier. In order to effectively manage this, a carrier needs to develop a process that allows them to compare Carrier Profiles and Driver Abstracts to verify that all required items have been reported by their drivers.

ComplianceBox manages this by providing company administrators/supervisors the ability to report on all known Collisions, Convictions, and CVSA Inspections filtered by any time period they like. This empowers carriers to easily view all these items quickly and easily. If a record is missing, they can easily add it (including any disciplinary or potential future disciplinary actions that have or may be taken for the driver not properly reported the item).

AR 314/2002 Commercial Vehicle Certificate and Insurance Regulation (Alberta)

41 (1) The registered owner of every commercial vehicle who is required to operate the vehicle under the authority of a safety fitness certificate must maintain, for each of that owner’s drivers, a driver record file containing the following information:

(a) the driver’s completed application form for employment with the registered owner;
(b)  a copy of the driver’s abstract in a form satisfactory to the Registrar when the driver is first hired or employed, dated within 30 days of the date of employment or hire;
(c)  annual updated copies of the driver’s abstract in a form satisfactory to the Registrar;
(d)  the driver’s employment history for the 3 years immediately preceding the time the driver started working for the carrier;
(e)  a record of the driver’s convictions of safety laws in the current year and in each of the 4 preceding years;
(f)  a record of any administrative penalty imposed on the driver under safety laws;
(g)  a record of all collisions involving a motor vehicle operated by the driver that are required to be reported to a peace officer under any enactment of Alberta or a jurisdiction outside Alberta;
(h)  a record of all training undertaken by a driver related to the operation of a commercial vehicle and compliance with safety laws;
(i)  a copy of any training certificate issued to the driver, in electronic or paper form, for the period starting on the date the training certificate is issued and continuing until 2 years after it expires, in accordance with Part 6 of the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Regulations under the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992 (Canada);
(j)  a copy of a current medical certificate for the driver.

This is just one of the many ways that ComplianceBox makes Transportation Compliance Requirements easier for Commercial Carriers. Reduce administrative burden, eliminate easy mistakes, and ensure you’re always prepared for a Compliance Audit. Click below to start your free 31 no-obligation trial now! No credit card is required to start the trial.