Trucking Risk Control Could Become the New Entrant Gate

Rob Carpenter

Sat, February 14, 2026 at 12:31 AM GMT+9 12 min read

There’s an old saying in the “fake rich” world: you can rent the Bentley, rent the mansion, shoot the video, post the lifestyle, and for a little while, you can make people believe you’ve arrived. But there’s one thing most people can’t fake. A jet. It’s too expensive, too scrutinized, and too many people have to sign off before you get the keys.

For decades, insurance was trucking’s jet.

You could get a USDOT number for free. You could file a BOC-3 for a small amount. You could lease a truck for a thousand bucks a week and a trailer for less. You could fake a lot of things on the way in. But you could not fake your way past an underwriter. That was the one door in this industry that actually required you to prove something before it opened.

When I started my own authority, I got put through the absolute ringer. Loss runs. MVRs. Operations questions. Safety management controls. Dispatch practices. Maintenance programs. Drug and alcohol testing. Driver qualification files. Someone actually wanted to know whether I had the business maturity and the risk controls to be trusted with 80,000 pounds next to families on I-95.

That gate has eroded. I think it’s time we talk about how to put it back.

What The Front Door Used To Look Like

Traditional insurance underwriting focused on screening risk. Before you could bind coverage and activate your authority, underwriters examined your operation. They reviewed your driver qualification process, MVR standards, drug and alcohol compliance, hours-of-service oversight, maintenance discipline, accident register, claims handling, organizational structure, and supervisory controls. That was the baseline.

At renewal, the process went even deeper. Agents and brokers assembled a full marketing package. They told your story. This is who they are. This is how they operate. This is how they manage risk. Here are the improvements they’ve made. They sold you to underwriters the way you’d sell a prospect to a captive group. That process enforced accountability, rewarded improvement, and created a natural barrier to entry that kept out those with no business operating 80,000-pound equipment on public highways.

Was it perfect? No. But it required the risk to prove itself before it received cheap access to the system.

What The Front Door Looks Like Now

Today, a growing slice of the market runs on self-attestation and instant-issue workflows. Especially the nefarious and poor performers. A new entrant goes online, self-declares a handful of details, who they are, what they have, how they operate, where they’re located, pays a premium, and walks away with a policy. No underwriter conversation. No document review. No verification of anything they just told you.

Story Continues  

That policy, paired with a $300 authority filing fee, a free USDOT number, and a $25 BOC-3, is enough to put a truck on the highway. The industry has moved toward connected and telematics-driven programs that can be activated quickly for new policyholders.

I’m not anti-tech. I work with captives and insurers constantly. Innovation in underwriting is necessary and overdue. But when speed replaces verification at the entry point, we’re moving the risk test from the underwriting desk to the highway.

The public is funding that experiment.

Timing Mismatch

FMCSA’s New Entrant Safety Assurance Program was an important step forward. New carriers are supposed to receive a safety audit within the first 12 months of operation and are considered new entrants for 18 months. That program is designed to verify whether a carrier has the basic safety management controls in place to operate.

But the timing is the problem. Chameleons and bad actors have stolen millions in freight and burned their bridges; they’re often closed or off to the secret side entity before any new entrant can audit them.

Under the current structure, a carrier receives authority, begins operations, moves freight, hires drivers, and accumulates exposure on public roads for months before anyone assesses whether it has the infrastructure to do so safely. That’s backward. We’re essentially telling people: get on the road now, and we’ll take a closer look later.

We all know what happens in that gap. Carriers with weak controls, weak maintenance, weak hiring, weak oversight, or outright fraudulent operations rack up miles, violations, and sometimes tragedies before the system even sees them.

The enforcement bandwidth to close that gap doesn’t exist. I’m not throwing rocks at FMCSA investigators. They’re doing the job with the resources they’ve got. But the math is unforgiving. Federal and state partners conducted roughly 12,300 compliance reviews in 2024. That’s roughly 1.5 percent coverage of the active carrier population. We cannot physically audit our way out of this at the front door using only government headcount.

So the jet disappeared at the same time our ability to catch the worst actors early stayed flat.

**How Do We Spend The Money We Do Have **

Before I lay out what I think we should do, I want to raise a question about what we’re already doing, because it matters.

FMCSA has previously contracted pre-authority screening work. The Crash Preventability Determination Program, administered under the Volpe Center, is one example of the agency using outside resources to support safety determinations. That contract was competitively bid. I know, because I bid on it.

We were not selected. The contract was awarded to a company that quoted roughly one-quarter the rate for the same scope of work, tens of thousands of crash preventability determinations over two years, for approximately $400,000. There’s no way you can hire enough US citizens to do that many reviews objectively in two years and still meet federal wage guidelines. It’s a literal impossibility.

There are only two ways you do that volume of work at that price. You’re either outsourcing the labor or you’re running an AI model with limited context outside the parameters used to determine causation. Both of those are problematic. Crash preventability is not a bulk processing exercise. It requires an understanding of crash dynamics, regulatory context, carrier operations, and on-the-ground reality. If we’re making those determinations on the cheap, we need to ask what we’re getting for our money and whether the quality matches the stakes.

I raise this not to relitigate a contract, but because it speaks directly to the broader problem: when we try to cut costs on safety verification, we tend to get what we pay for. If we’re going to build a front-door screening model for new entrants, it has to be grounded in legitimate expertise, not lowest-bid economics.

Make Contextual, Pre-emptive Risk Control Great Again

The answer isn’t shutting the door on new drivers or new businesses. The answer is making sure they’re actually ready before we hand them the keys to 80,000 pounds on a public highway. And we can do this without adding a single federal employee to the payroll.

Here’s what I’m proposing, and it’s modeled on the exact process that works in the private insurance market every day. I know because I built one of the few fleet-exclusive risk control programs for captives and insurance providers.

Raise the entry fee to fund the screening

The current authority application cost is roughly $300. Let’s be honest: $300 is not a barrier to anything. That’s your rented Rolls-Royce. It’s enough to look the part, but not enough to prove you belong.

Increase it to $1,000. That’s still entirely accessible for any legitimate operator who is serious about starting a business. But it’s enough to filter out the undercapitalized, the unserious, and the opportunistic entries that clog the system and create risk for everyone else.

A portion of that fee funds mandatory pre-authority risk-control screening. No new tax dollars. No additional appropriations. Those entering the system pay for verification that protects everyone already in it.

This is what we currently do for captive group member prospects. You don’t join a captive group as a member without a screening and proof that your risk profile is acceptable.

Require a pre-authority risk control assessment

Before authority is activated, every applicant completes a standardized, off-site review of basic safety management controls. This is not a full compliance audit. This is a minimum viable control review, the same kind of assessment I perform for captive insurance groups when they’re deciding whether to admit a new member.

The review covers the fundamentals: driver qualification file process, drug and alcohol compliance program, hours-of-service oversight, preventive maintenance and inspection program, accident register and claims reporting, safety policies and supervisory structure, and proof of operational control. That last one matters more than people realize; it’s how you catch ghost leasing setups and paper operations before they ever touch a highway.

Outcomes are straightforward. Approved. Conditional, with required corrections and a monitoring period. Or deferred, meaning the applicant has fundamental gaps that need to be addressed before they can operate. Authority activation is tied to completing this baseline verification.

I built this exact system for my own practice because I’m a one-person team, and I still assess thousands of fleets a year for captive groups and insurers nationwide. It’s an electronic intake with standardized questions, required document uploads, automated routing into a backend system with alerts and scoring, cross-checks against FMCSA safety history, and a clear outcome with reasons and corrective actions. It’s not magic. Its structure. And it scales.

Keep the existing new entrant audit, and make it better

Nothing in this proposal eliminates the 12- to 18-month new-entrant audit. It stays. But its role changes. Instead of being the first meaningful contact between FMCSA and a new carrier, it becomes a validation checkpoint. The carrier has already been screened. The fundamentals have already been verified. Now the audit confirms whether the carrier is actually doing what they said they’d do.

That’s a much more efficient use of limited enforcement resources. You’re not starting from zero with every carrier you walk into. You have a baseline. You have documents. You have a score. You know what to look for.

Monthly risk monitoring after the authority

This is the other half of the solution, and it’s where the system goes from reactive to preventive.

Every new entrant receives a monthly risk profile scorecard. What changed in your FMCSA profile this month? Violations. Crashes. BASIC indicator movements. ISS trends. Maintenance patterns. Paired with corrective recommendations. DataQs guidance where needed. Coaching triggers when patterns emerge.

This isn’t punitive. This isn’t enforcement, this is a review. This is the same service I provide to my captive and insurer clients right now. A monthly report card that says: here’s what changed, here’s what it means, here’s what to check in your program, and here’s how to fix it. It turns the system from one that punishes failure after the fact into one that catches drift early and gives carriers the tools to correct it.

Who Does The Work

This is where the scalability lives. You don’t need to hire thousands of new federal employees. You contract with accredited, fleet-focused risk control professionals who already exist and already do this work in the private market and have done it for years.

I work for roughly 200 insurance groups, from large captives down to small regional insurers, agents, and brokers. The risk control professionals supporting this market understand FMCSRs, loss drivers, crash dynamics, and operational realities. We’re not generalists. We’re not industrial hygienists who got handed a fleet account. We are specialists who can assess a carrier’s operations and determine whether the risk profile is acceptable.

A vetted pool of these professionals, operating under standardized protocols and a standardized intake and scoring methodology, could process the volume of new-entrant applications without straining government headcount. The infrastructure exists. The expertise exists. The technology to automate and scale the intake exists. What’s missing is the decision to use it.

Why It Matters

Trucking is not a private club. But it is a shared-risk ecosystem. Whether we like it or not, this industry operates like a captive group. The losses are shared across insurance markets, courtrooms, enforcement actions, and communities. Every nuclear verdict, every preventable fatality, every chameleon carrier that slips through the cracks, we all pay for it. In premiums. In public trust. In regulatory backlash. And in families that never make it home.

In any captive, admission standards matter. You don’t let a high-risk member into the pool without verifying that they meet the group’s minimum expectations, because everyone else bears the cost when you get it wrong.

That’s the principle we’ve lost at the entry point. That’s the principle we need to restore.

I’m writing this as both an article and a proposal. The framework I’ve described here is not theoretical. It’s operational. We run a version of this system every day for the private insurance market, and it works. It scales. It catches what needs to be caught. It does it without requiring a single additional government hire.

This is a conversation worth having. The current entry model was built for a different era, when insurance underwriting provided the scrutiny that the application process didn’t. That scrutiny has diminished in parts of the market. The application cost hasn’t changed meaningfully. The enforcement infrastructure can’t address both gaps simultaneously.

A user-funded, pre-authority risk control screening model is cost-neutral to taxpayers, scalable through existing private-sector expertise, and aligned with how risk is already evaluated in the markets that insure these carriers. It doesn’t replace anything FMCSA already does. It adds a layer of verification at the one point in the process where it matters most: before the truck hits the road.

The goal isn’t to make entry impossible. The goal is to make entry responsible.

A modest increase in the cost of authority, paired with a standardized pre-authority risk-control review and ongoing monthly monitoring, rebuilds a modern version of the gate that insurance once provided. One that uses today’s technology and today’s data, but restores yesterday’s discipline.

We don’t need more paperwork. We need a smarter front door. Once we protect the door, we have an entire other team to clean up what’s already inside.

Insurance used to be that door.

It can be built again if we choose to.

The post Trucking Risk Control Could Become the New Entrant Gate appeared first on FreightWaves.

Terms and Privacy Policy

Privacy Dashboard

More Info