Reduce risk between annual MVR reviews

September 22, 2016 / 1 min read

A recent American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) study of approximately 600,000 United States truck drivers examined the extent to which drivers with poor driving records were likely to be in a crash within the next 12 months compared with drivers with clean records. The study found that 80 to 96 percent of drivers who were in a crash or received violations for failing to signal or for improperly passing, turning, or changing lanes were more likely to have a future crash.

Many companies may perform annual reviews only because it satisfies U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) requirements for commercial drivers. Others may find it too costly to conduct frequent MVR checks throughout the year. Still others may not have the necessary resources to collect, sort, review, and compare MVRs more than once a year.

Yet if you’re only looking at driver performance at annual review time, you may be missing an opportunity to address poor driving behavior before it causes serious problems, large losses, and possible lawsuits.

Automated monthly driver monitoring offers a solution. With this approach, you’ll receive an alert when new activity appears on your drivers’ department of motor vehicles (DMV) records. This helps you stay compliant and can lower your costs without overburdening your resources.

Should you receive an alert on any of your monitored drivers, an MVR for that driver is ordered automatically. You can review the report and, if necessary, use it to take immediate corrective action. In addition, you’re now able to postpone that driver’s DOT-mandated annual MVR review for a full 12 months, which helps you save on time and expense.

Best of all, with automated monthly driver monitoring, your potential window of risk may be substantially reduced—shrinking from 12 months to one month—because now you’re no longer waiting a full year to review driver performance.