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The ISS uses the carrier’s safety performance data to generate an ISS “score” that helps an inspection officer decide if an inspection is necessary.
When DOT roadside inspection officers are determining whether or not to inspect a commercial motor vehicle and/or its driver, they often turn to the Inspection Selection System (ISS).
How it works. The ISS is a quick, easy-to-use “decision-making aid” to guide law enforcement officers in selecting vehicles and drivers for roadside inspection. The ISS takes the fairly complicated data from the Safety Measurement System (SMS) that is operated by Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which rates carriers based on their safety performance, and packages it into an easy-to-use format for officers on the road.
The ISS assigns a single number between 0 and 100 to a carrier based on its safety performance in each of the seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) that the SMS tracks: Unsafe Driving, Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance, Driver Fitness, Drugs and Alcohol, Vehicle Maintenance, Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance, and the Crash Indicator. This number is then used to generate a recommendation of Pass, Optional, or Inspect to be used by inspectors when selecting vehicles and drivers for inspection. Carriers that have a recommendation of “Inspect” or “Optional” see a lot more roadside inspections than carriers that have the “Pass” recommendation.
Though ISS scores are not available to the public, motor carriers can log into the FMCSA’s Portal website to see their scores:
As long as the FMCSA has enough data on the carrier, and the carrier has no BASICs that are over the intervention threshold, the carrier will end up with a score of under 50 and a recommendation of Pass.
Why it is important to know where you stand? Very few inspections are conducted on the roadside based on “random selection.” Most of the time, the officer has a reason for selecting a certain vehicle and driver for inspection. The two most common reasons include: