When a commercial truck is involved in a serious crash, one of the first places investigators look is a publicly accessible federal database that has been tracking that carrier’s safety performance for years.
The Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program generates monthly safety scores for virtually every active motor carrier operating in interstate commerce. Those scores are not just a regulatory tool. They are a contemporaneous record of what a carrier knew, or should have known, about its safety problems before the crash occurred.
What Is the CSA Program?
CSA is FMCSA’s compliance model to improve commercial motor vehicle safety and reduce large truck and bus crashes, injuries, and fatalities. The Safety Measurement System (SMS) analyzes compliance and safety violations discovered during roadside inspections, along with data gathered during investigations and reportable crashes, to measure a carrier’s performance in seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, commonly referred to as BASICs.1
The SMS analyzes a company’s roadside inspection results, crash data, and compliance review findings over the past 24 months, then assigns percentile rankings in each of the seven BASIC categories. Percentile rankings range from 0 to 100, with higher numbers indicating worse performance. By way of example, a CSA score of 80 percent in the category of Unsafe Driving means that company’s unsafe driving violations place it in the worst 20 percent of carriers in its peer group.2
The scoring system is relative, not absolute. Carriers are compared against peers with similar inspection exposure, which means the rankings reflect where a carrier stands within the industry rather than against a fixed threshold. The incoming violation and crash data are weighted based on how likely each event will lead to injuries or crashes and how recently they occurred. More recent violations carry more weight than older ones.3 Violations roll off after 24 months.
One important caveat for anyone researching this topic later: FMCSA has approved a revised methodology, sometimes referred to as the Enhanced Carrier Safety Measurement System, that will rename BASICs to “compliance categories,” fold Controlled Substances/Alcohol into Unsafe Driving, split Vehicle Maintenance into two categories, and raise several intervention thresholds. As of this writing the change had been approved but had not yet fully replaced the system described below. Readers should confirm the current category names and thresholds on FMCSA’s SMS website.
The Seven BASICs
Unsafe Driving covers dangerous or careless operation of commercial motor vehicles. Hours of Service Compliance covers operating Commercial Motor Vehicles (CMVs) when ill, fatigued, or in violation of HOS rules. Driver Fitness covers operation of CMVs by drivers who are unfit due to lack of training, experience, or medical qualification. Controlled Substance/Alcohol covers the operation of a CMV while impaired due to alcohol, illegal drugs, and misuse of prescription medications or over-the-counter medications. Vehicle Maintenance covers CMV failure due to improper or inadequate maintenance. Hazardous Materials Compliance refers to the unsafe marking, handling, or transportation of hazardous materials in an amount requiring a placard. Crash Indicator captures histories or patterns of high crash involvement including frequency and severity.5
Not all BASICs carry the same weight in terms of their relationship to future crashes. FMCSA’s analysis found that the Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, and HOS Compliance BASICs have the strongest correlation to crash risk.6 As a result, those BASICs carry lower intervention thresholds than the others. By way of example, the Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, and HOS Compliance thresholds are set at the 65th percentile, while the Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hazardous Materials, and Driver Fitness threshold is set at the 80th percentile.7 FMCSA acknowledged in 2012 congressional testimony that analysis at the time did not show a strong statistical association between the Driver Fitness and Hazardous Materials/Cargo-Related BASICs and future crash rates.8
Two BASICs are withheld from the public view of the SMS website: the Crash Indicator BASIC and the Hazardous Materials BASIC. The SMS public view does not require a log in, and allows carriers, customers, insurance providers, and any other member of the public to access a carrier’s raw inspection and crash data. However, property carriers’ BASIC percentile scores are not publicly displayed for any BASIC category and only the underlying raw measures are shown.9 Pursuant to the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA removed percentile rankings for property carriers from public view.10 Investigators and attorneys wishing to obtain the full SMS data, historical BASIC scores, and underlying violations records should request this information through discovery or a Freedom of Information Act request.11
Impact of a High Score
When a carrier’s percentile in any BASIC rises above the intervention threshold, it enters FMCSA’s enforcement pipeline. Carriers that exceed a predetermined threshold for an individual BASIC score are subject to intervention by FMCSA. Interventions include the following:12
A motor carrier that has not demonstrated past safety and compliance deficiencies, but is beginning to show them, will receive a warning letter from FMCSA highlighting the specific BASICs that may require attention. A UMTRI analysis cited in FMCSA testimony to Congress indicates that 83 percent of carriers that receive a warning letter only (no further interventions) resolved the identified safety or compliance problem within twelve months of receiving the letter.13
That statistic has an important implication: for the remaining 17 percent of carriers that do not resolve the problem, the warning letter becomes a documented record that the carrier was told it had a safety deficiency and failed to address it. In litigation, the letter serves as dated communication from a federal agency to the carrier’s management identifying specific problem areas by name.
CSA Data as Evidence in Litigation
In litigation, CSA data does not prove causation. However, it can establish knowledge. A carrier with a 90th-percentile score in Unsafe Driving in the months before a crash cannot credibly argue that the problem was unforeseeable. In fact, the federal government had already identified the pattern and communicated it to the carrier. The violations underlying that score, such as the speeding citations, improper lane changes, following-distance violations, and cell phone use, are individually documented in inspection reports tied to specific drivers, specific dates, and specific locations.
When a carrier’s SMS scores show persistent safety concerns that went unaddressed, or when prior accidents and near-misses produced no corrective action, the carrier’s supervision failures become central to liability.14
Historical CSA data is particularly important because the 24-month rolling window means that the SMS reflects the carrier’s recent operational history. A crash that happens in month 23 of a sustained period of elevated scores is not an isolated incident, rather it is the outcome of a pattern. Discovery should target not just the violations underlying the scores themselves but also the carrier’s internal response to them. Evidence of safety meeting minutes and corrective action plans (or lack thereof) as well as correspondence with FMCSA and communications between management and operations staff about the violations underlying the scores demonstrates a carrier’s safety culture.
One important technical point: the SMS scores visible today do not show what the scores were in the past. Historical snapshots of a carrier’s SMS data must be obtained through FMCSA directly or through discovery of the carrier’s own records, which savvy carriers monitor monthly. Carriers using third-party compliance services receive monthly reports on their BASIC scores. These reports are also discoverable and can reveal month-by-month awareness of deteriorating performance.
Broker Liability & the Negligent Selection Theory
The underlying inspection and violation measures behind the CSA scores are publicly accessible for most BASICs. The percentile rankings, the comparative scores FMCSA uses for enforcement decisions, are visible to the carrier itself through its SMS portal login and obtainable by investigators through the discovery process. Because of the SMS’s accessibility, the use of CSA data expands beyond its regulatory function and into the commercial decision-making space. In turn, litigation often involves parties other than the carrier itself.
Although CSA was designed for regulators, its influence extends into commercial decision-making. Insurers, brokers, and shippers frequently review safety trends when evaluating carrier relationships. Best practices involve reviewing CSA data alongside DOT safety ratings, inspection history, crash trends, and operational transparency.15
When a broker selects a carrier with a documented history of FMCSA violations, elevated SMS safety scores, or a pattern of out-of-service violations, and that carrier causes a crash, the broker may be liable for negligent selection.16 Whether that kind of state-law claim survives had been an unsettled, circuit-split question for years, with some courts holding it preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) and others allowing it to proceed. The U.S. Supreme Court resolved the split in May 2026, holding unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that the FAAAA’s safety exception preserves state-law negligent-hiring claims against brokers who select motor carriers, meaning such claims are not federally preempted.17 Courts evaluate whether the broker checked the carrier’s safety record before assigning the load, whether the broker prioritized price over safety credentials, and whether the broker’s contract required the carrier to maintain specific safety standards.
Freight brokers can face liability under several theories, including negligent hiring or negligent entrustment, vicarious liability, and liability assumed by contract.18 The negligent selection theory is the most frequently pursued in crash litigation involving broker defendants, and following Montgomery, it turns directly on what the broker knew or should have known about the carrier’s safety record at the time it tendered the load, not on whether the claim can be dismissed as preempted at the outset.
Freight brokers and shippers that select a trucking company with a high CSA score or a Conditional Safety Rating take on meaningful negligent-selection litigation risk, particularly now that the preemption defense many brokers previously relied on has been foreclosed nationwide. A Conditional rating or elevated score is not automatically disqualifying by itself, and a broker that conducts and documents reasonable vetting can still defend a selection decision. But industry awareness of this exposure has grown substantially, and many brokers now use automated carrier-monitoring platforms that flag score changes in real time. A broker that uses one of those platforms has a timestamped record of what it knew. A broker that does not use any vetting tool at all has a harder time explaining its due diligence.
Discovery in broker liability cases should target the carrier selection process: what vetting criteria the broker maintained as a written policy, what data it actually pulled on the carrier before tendering the load, whether the broker’s platform generated any alerts about the carrier’s scores, and whether any employee raised concerns that were overridden by rate or availability considerations.
Limitations of CSA Data & How Carriers Exploit Them
No discussion of CSA scores is complete without acknowledging their limitations. For years, trucking industry groups argued that CSA score thresholds by BASIC do not accurately correlate with safety risks, and there is evidence suggesting this with respect to the Driver Fitness and Cargo-Related categories, as discussed above. With the passage of the FAST Act in December 2015, FMCSA was required to remove property carrier percentile rankings from public view while the National Academies of Sciences conducted a study and FMCSA evaluated potential changes to the program.19
The FAST Act restriction on public access to BASIC percentiles does not prevent those scores from being obtained in litigation. Discovery can compel production of the carrier’s internal SMS records. Sometimes carriers will downplay the significance of their data, creating confusion. Carriers often argue that scores do not definitively predict crashes. That argument mischaracterizes how CSA data is used in litigation. CSA data in litigation is not offered as a crash prediction. It is offered as proof of notice and foreseeability: the carrier had documented safety problems, received federal communication about them, and chose not to act.
Finally, carriers can challenge individual violations through FMCSA’s DataQs system. Errors do occur, and successful challenges remove the violation from the carrier’s SMS profile. Motor carriers have up to three years from the date of an inspection to file a Request for Data Review (RDR) challenging a violation, and up to five years to challenge a crash record.20 The existence of DataQs means that a carrier’s failure to challenge a violation it disagreed with can itself be significant. A carrier that accumulated violations without disputing them has, in effect, accepted the record.
Discovery in Crash Investigations
In any crash case involving a carrier with a history of elevated CSA scores, discovery should target the following:
Where a broker is involved, discovery should also target the carrier vetting records and platform data the broker used, the carrier’s CSA scores as of the date the load was tendered, and any internal communications about the carrier selection process.
The SMS is updated monthly. The federal government has been tracking this carrier’s safety performance every month for years. The question in litigation is not whether the data exists, because it does. The question is what the carrier or broker did with it.
Sources
- [1] U.S. DOT, Testimony: FMCSA's Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) Program.
- [2] FMCSA, Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology.
- [3] FMCSA, Safety Measurement System Fact Sheet.
- [4] U.S. DOT, Testimony: FMCSA's Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) Program.
- [5] FMCSA, Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology, Description of the BASICs.
- [6] Revised Carrier Safety Measurement System, 88 Fed. Reg. 10250
- [7] FMCSA, Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology
- [8] U.S. DOT, Testimony: FMCSA's Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) Program and Its Impact on Small Businesses
- [9] FMCSA, Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology
- [10] FMCSA, FMCSA Removes Property Carrier Compliance and Safety Performance Data From Public Display
- [11] 49 C.F.R. Part 7 (DOT FOIA regulations); 5 U.S.C. § 552
- [12] FMCSA, CSA Interventions.
- [13] U.S. DOT, Testimony: FMCSA's Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) Program
- [14] A.J. Bruning, Red Flags Adjusters Should Look for in Truck Accident Claims Investigations, Claims Journal
- [15] U.S. GAO, Motor Carrier Safety: More Assessment and Transparency Could Enhance Benefits of New Oversight Program, GAO-11-858; FMCSA, Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology.
- [16] Congressional Research Service, Does Federal Law Preempt Negligent Selection Claims Against Freight Brokers?, LSB11400.
- [17] Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1238_1b7d.pdf.
- [18] Reliance Partners, Beyond Insurance: Carrier Vetting Is Crucial to Protecting Freight Brokers.
- [19] FAST Act § 5223; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement
- [20] 49 C.F.R. § 350.201(s); FMCSA, DataQs Analyst's Guide.