SAFETY MAINTENANCE CONFERENCE: MAY 14-15

Where can you hear from Illinois's FMCSA Division Administrator, IDOT Auditors, IL Secretary of State, IL State Police, receive certification for drug & alcohol testing, and learn about Natural Gas in trucking?  It's all at the 2014 ITA Safety Maintenance Conference, May 14 & 15 at the iHotel & Conference Center in Champaign, IL. 

The conference will be a valuable educational and networking opportunity for anyone that is involved with safety or with maintenance at your trucking company.   Click on any of the links below for more information or to register.  Monday is the deadline for hotel reservations.  Be sure to register today.

Agenda and Registration Form 

Sponsorship Form 

Exhibitor Form 

ITA would like to thank the following companies that have agreed to sponsor this year's event:

JJ Keller & Associates - Gold Level Sponsor

Help, Inc - Provider of PrePass - Silver Level Sponsor

J&L Services - Awards Luncheon Sponsor

Georgantas Claims - Wednesday Lunch Sponsor

Proposed Amendments to IRP Out for Comment - This year there are only two proposed ballots to amend the International Registration Plan.  These are now out for public comment through the IRP website at www.irponline.org, under IRP Ballots.  Both measures will be discussed at the IRP annual meeting next month.  (See the SLN of 3/28/2014.)  The first ballot, denominated 2014.01, sponsored by the IRP Board, would require charter buses operated interstate to be registered under the IRP.  Ever since the Plan was established, those registering charter buses have been allowed by IRP either to apportion fees under the Plan or to operate under registration reciprocity.  That option was put into the Plan because such operators don't know from one year to the next what states they may be traveling in, and there's been no way under IRP to handle that situation equitably.  The amendment would remove the option.  On the one hand, this seems reasonable, since, under the Full Reciprocity Plan, which takes effect with IRP next year (the bus amendment would take effect the first of 2016), an IRP registrant will automatically be registered for all states.  On the other hand, some bus operators who have depended on reciprocity for decades may be unprepared for the higher registration fees some would have to pay under IRP.  The charter-bus industry has not yet taken a position on the proposal.

The second ballot, 2014.02, sponsored by Nebraska, concerns audit.  Under IRP's recently rewritten rules on audit and record keeping, which went into effect less than twelve months ago, a base state preparing to audit an IRP registrant must first determine whether the registrant's records are adequate - in both quantity and quality - to permit an audit to be done at all.  If they are adequate, the audit proceeds, but if they're not, the state imposes a penalty of 20 percent of the IRP fees the registrant originally paid for the year at issue.  The ballot suggests that this is not appropriate when, despite the inadequacy of the registrant's records, the state can tell that the registrant actually traveled in one or more states for which he paid no fees.  The proposal would allow the state to take account of such a situation when it calculated the 20 percent penalty.  While we see the point of the ballot, the proposal seems to us misguided.  The penalty provision was added to the Plan specifically to deal with those instances where records are too poor for an audit to be done, or where they are missing altogether.  The 20 percent assessment was not intended even approximately to compensate any given state, but rather to penalize the registrant for failing to live up to his responsibilities.  In the nature of the circumstances, there would be no way to tell what fees might actually have been owed.  The proposal disregards this, and in doing so, its very open-ended language would allow the auditing state to make whatever adjustments - which would, in effect, have to be guesses -- it wanted.  This is fair to no one. 

CA AG Opinion OK's Videotaping Drivers - An opinion issued by the California Attorney General has held that in-cab video surveillance of commercial drivers for potential disciplinary action does not violate state law.  The opinion starts with the provision of the California Labor Code (sec. 1051) that prohibits an employer from requiring an employee to be photographed or fingerprinted for the purpose of giving the images to a third party.  The opinion reviews the history of this statute, and finds it originated in 1913 as a part of the state's effort to stop blacklisting by employers.  It remarks that such provisions have not been much used since the passage of the federal National Labor Relations Act.  Here, although the taping was done by a third party, it was solely for the use of the employer in assessing a driver's performance.  This is quite different from the activity aimed at by the labor code, and in fact more recent California laws specifically recognize practices such as that under discussion here.  Opinion No. 12-1101, issued February 13, 2014

ATA's NAFC Meeting Coming Up in June - Registration is now open for the joint meeting of two ATA councils, the National Accounting & Finance Council and the Information Technology & Logistics Council, to be held this year June 16 to 18 at the Lincolnshire Marriott Resort in the northern suburbs of Chicago.  The NAFC is ATA's individual membership organization for accountants, insurers, finance and tax experts serving the trucking industry, both in-house with motor carriers and with third-party suppliers.  The NAFC sessions at the meeting will include updates on independent contractor issues, accounting developments, captive insurance companies, and state tax developments (the last presented by this writer).  Attendees can also go to any of the ITLC sessions as well.  For more information, or to register for the meeting, go here:

http://www.trucking.org/event.aspx?uid=686121da-766a-4a17-9176-6dda78377f66.