BS BULLETIN:

• A fatal Ohio crash involving an Uzbek national with a commercial driver’s license has helped expose what trucking insiders call “chameleon carriers.”
• The alleged scheme uses multiple companies sharing the same trucks, drivers and operations, allowing violations to be spread among different carrier authorities.
• The Trump administration is now conducting a sweeping crackdown on CDL fraud, shell companies and unqualified commercial drivers.

A fatal Ohio crash involving an Uzbek truck driver who allegedly needed Google Translate to communicate with police is now helping expose a much larger problem buried inside America’s commercial trucking industry.

And the name insiders have for it is almost too perfect: “Chameleon carriers.”

Tobias “Toby” Forsythe, a 21-year-old goalkeeper for the University of Massachusetts Lowell men’s soccer team, was killed July 5 when authorities say a semi driven by 42-year-old Uzbek national Bekhzod Asrarov rear-ended Forsythe’s Honda Accord on Interstate 71 in Madison County, Ohio.

Asrarov entered the United States through the diversity visa lottery program during the Biden administration.

Court documents cited by Fox News say that after the crash, Asrarov could not speak or understand enough English to communicate with responding state troopers without Google Translate — despite holding an Ohio commercial driver’s license.

He is also accused of removing a dashboard camera from his truck after the collision in an attempt to conceal or destroy evidence.

But Fox News’ new investigation goes well beyond one driver.

Researchers and trucking-industry veterans say southwest Ohio has become home to a large collection of trucking companies, including operations linked to members of the Uzbek community, some of which have accumulated serious federal safety violations.

The deeper concern is the alleged use of “chameleon carriers.”

An industry veteran described the setup as a network of companies that appear independent on paper while sharing the same drivers, trucks and underlying operation.

The advantage is obvious.

Instead of one company accumulating ten inspections and ten violations, those problems can potentially be divided among multiple companies.

If one carrier loses its insurance, receives a bad safety record or is shut down, the equipment and drivers can simply move under another company’s authority.

As the industry veteran put it, “Their operation never stops.”

The same structure, he warned, can also make cargo theft easier because one company can vanish after obtaining an expensive shipment while affiliated companies continue operating.

Meanwhile, the federal government has started digging.

The Trump administration recently launched a coordinated Justice Department, Department of Transportation and Department of Homeland Security crackdown targeting CDL fraud, unauthorized employment, identity-document fraud, shell companies and other abuses in commercial trucking.

Federal officials say investigators have received more than 1,000 leads involving suspicious or unsafe trucking-related businesses.

Homeland Security also conducted enforcement activity targeting more than 200 driving schools across 23 states.

DOT separately removed 110 CDL schools associated with more than 5,000 drivers who failed English-language proficiency tests.

Seven schools targeted in the recent enforcement push are located in Ohio.

One of them, Turan CDL School in Middletown, has advertised training to Uzbek speakers and allegedly promoted the possibility of obtaining a commercial license without first learning English.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration recently issued the school a Notice of Proposed Removal.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that commercial drivers who cannot understand road signs or communicate with law enforcement should never be behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound vehicle.

Cincinnati trucking-industry veteran Victor Louis described the stakes even more vividly.

A commercial truck, he said, is essentially a “40-ton missile.”

And if the new federal investigation is correct about how easily some carriers have been able to change names, shift drivers and move equipment between companies, the problem is no longer simply who got a CDL.

It is whether regulators can even keep track of who is operating the truck.

MY QUICK TAKE

Government regulators have been chasing shell companies since long before anyone invented the interstate highway.

Change the corporate name. Move the assets. Open another company. Suddenly yesterday’s problem belongs to somebody who technically no longer exists.

The difference here is that the asset being shuffled around is not a desk chair.

It weighs 80,000 pounds and is traveling 70 miles an hour next to your family.

That is where the old Washington argument about “regulation” gets considerably less theoretical.

The Interstate Commerce Commission began regulating trucking in the 1930s. Washington spent much of the next half-century arguing that there was too much regulation. Then came deregulation, competition and an industry that became vastly more efficient.

Fine.

But deregulation was never supposed to mean, “Nobody knows who owns the truck this week.”

And there is something particularly maddening about requiring ordinary Americans to jump through seventeen hoops to renew almost anything while somebody may apparently be able to reincarnate a troubled trucking operation with new paperwork.

A “chameleon carrier” is a wonderfully clever name.

For an 80,000-pound vehicle barreling down I-71, I’d prefer something much more boring: Identifiable.

DBS WIRE SOURCES:

• Fox News — How an Uzbek truck driver’s fatal crash exposed troubling fraud trend: ‘Chameleon carriers’
• Justice Department — Federal agencies launch interagency crackdown on trucking fraud
• FMCSA — DOT, DHS and federal prosecutors launch trucking fraud enforcement effort
• FMCSA — DOT and DHS crack down on fraud in CDL schools
• U.S. DOT — New anti-fraud registration system targets suspicious trucking carriers