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Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Industry unites for Freight Fraud Symposium in Dallas
FreightWaves is set to host its first-ever Freight Fraud Symposium and Fraud Fighters Awards ceremony on May 14 in Dallas. The event will address the rising threat of fraud in the transportation sector and recognize innovative solutions that are helping to mitigate the impact of this burgeoning criminal crime. Freight fraud costs the industry millions of dollars annually and erodes trust throughout the supply chain. Chris Burroughs, president of the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), said at the association's Capital Ideas Conference earlier this month that the situation has 'obviously exploded into a massive fraud.' The symposium will unite industry experts to discuss emerging trends in fraud as well as strategies to prevent it. Speakers include representatives from companies including Overhaul, Highway, Truckstop, Uber Freight, Reliance Partners, Flexport, DAT, GenLogs and more. 'Freight fraud is a growing concern across the industry, and this event brings the right people together to share what they're seeing and how they're responding. For Highway, it's a chance to listen, collaborate and help move the conversation forward in a meaningful way,' said Michael Caney, chief commercial officer for the company. A key focus will be on combating sophisticated scams like double-brokering, in which carriers re-broker loads without consent of its broker, and identity theft tactics such as stealing Department of Transportation PINs. Chris McLoughlin, senior director of operations, risk and compliance at Uber Freight, emphasized that time is of the essence in fighting fraud. 'Events like this are a critical moment to share what's working, learn from peers and strengthen the collaborative web needed to outpace bad actors.' 'We want to equip attendees with tools and insights they can implement immediately, while also encouraging long-term collaboration across the ecosystem,' McLoughlin added. 'Fraud prevention can't be solved in silos – we're looking to build stronger connections with other industry leaders, raise the bar on security expectations and reinforce that with the right approach, freight fraud can be met with tech-enabled defense.' The Fraud Fighters Awards will honor companies that have mounted those advanced technological defenses to combat such threats. Nominations remain open until 5 p.m. ET on May 8, with no fee for applying, to ensure that all companies have the opportunity to be acknowledged or to acknowledge those contributions. Eligible innovations may include software for verifying carrier identities, real-time shipment tracking systems, and tools to detect and mitigate fraud attempts. Nominees will be judged on innovation, effectiveness and industry impact. 'We're hoping to leave the event with a clearer picture of where the biggest gaps are and how we can work together to close them,' said Caney. Register for the event here. Articles by Grace Sharkey Is trade fraud about to surge? Landstar anticipates fraud-related earnings hit 'Owner' of fictitious logistics firm sentenced in $2.8M COVID relief scam The post Industry unites for Freight Fraud Symposium in Dallas appeared first on FreightWaves.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Another circuit weighs broker liability, boosting odds of Supreme Court review
Another case involving the question of broker liability – one that brokerage giant TQL already won at the federal district court level – is awaiting a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit on the appeal from the family of a woman killed by a truck hired by TQL. The location of the case is significant. The original case, Cox vs. TQL, was decided in favor of TQL in June 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. Ohio is in the 6th Circuit of the federal judiciary system. Oral arguments were heard in January. Attorneys who represent brokerage companies have been hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the question of whether a broker is liable if a carrier hired by the 3PL gets into an accident or some other misfortune occurs, such as a theft. The scoreboard so far: Brokerages have prevailed in cases not just in lower courts but at the appellate level in the 7th and 11th circuits. But in the case of Miller vs. C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW), a 9th Circuit court ruled against the brokerage in a complicated decision. With the split decisions among the circuits, there have been at least three attempts to get the Supreme Court to clarify the issue of broker liability, but it has swatted them all away so far in not granting certiorari. One of those cases also involved TQL. Its attempt to get Supreme Court review was unusual in that while it was the plaintiff that filed the request with the high court, TQL, which had won at the appellate level in the 11th Circuit, agreed with the plaintiff that the Supreme Court should take up the issue. Like many others in the brokerage sector, it sought to have Supreme Court clarification on the issues. But the request was denied in January. A decision by the 6th Circuit upholding the lower court ruling in favor of TQL would add slightly to the split, because the scorecard would have three circuits ruling in favor of the legal argument that federal law under the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (F4A) preempts broker liability in such cases, with the 9th Circuit decision in Miller vs. C.H. Robinson on the other side of the divide to a limited degree. But a 6th Circuit decision in favor of the plaintiff in the TQL case, the family of Greta Cox, killed in the 2019 crash, would create further divisions in the issue, which might pry open the door to Supreme Court review a little wider. At the recent Capital Ideas Conference of the Transportation Intermediaries Association, Marc Blubaugh, co-chair of the transportation practice at the Blubaugh law firm – and coincidentally located in Columbus, Ohio, in the 6th Circuit – raised the prospect of Cox vs. TQL helping a push for certiorari on the question of broker liability. 'The more circuit decisions that come out, the greater the likelihood that the court would resolve the split among the circuits,' Blubaugh said. 'It is one of the criteria that the court looks at in addition to whether it is an issue of critical importance to the Supreme Court.' In the Ohio case, according to court documents, Greta Cox was driving with her grandson Brian Ragland on May 8, 2019, when her car was struck from behind by a truck driven by Amarjit Singh Khaira, who was driving for a company called Golden Transit. That company had been hired by TQL to transport condiments from Kraft Heinz (NASDAQ: KHC) from Illinois to California. In the original complaint filed by the Cox estate in January 2019, attorneys make several claims. One is that TQL was a motor carrier and identified itself as such. It's not just a casual term in litigation questions over brokers and the F4A; decisions have been made in favor of 3PLs in which a court has determined a 3PL is not a motor carrier. If it were, it could be found liable under the so-called 'safety exception' of F4A, which has the potential to bring in a wider range of negligence and other claims against a carrier that otherwise might be blocked by F4A. The key provision of F4A, which dates back to 1994, is that a state cannot take regulatory action that impacts a 'price, route or service' of a motor carrier or other transportation method. But the safety exception says F4A does not 'restrict the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles,' including such issues as cargo size, weight and insurance. It was the safety exception that led to an unfavorable decision for C.H. Robinson. The lawsuit also says Golden Transit was 'an unsafe, incompetent motor carrier with a history of publicly available red flags [and had] a history of safety violations.' The initial suit against Golden Transit and its drivers was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. That left the litigation against TQL, which said action against it was preempted by F4A. Judge Jeffrey Hopkins agreed. Hopkins said of the Cox estate's claim that TQL was a motor carrier, which could have opened the door to the safety exception, that the charge was 'preempted because a common law negligence claim enforced against a broker is not a law that is with respect to motor vehicles.' On the question of liability and whether finding a broker can be liable or negligent under F4A, Hopkins turned to a court ruling in a case involving Ying Ye and GlobalTranz, in which the 3PL prevailed. The case was one of the decisions where the losing plaintiff sought Supreme Court review and didn't get it. 'The enforcement of such a claim and the accompanying imposition of liability would have a significant economic effect on broker services,' Hopkins wrote. He then cited, working from the GlobalTranz case: 'By recognizing common-law negligence claims, courts would impose in the name of state law a new and clear duty of care on brokers, the breach of which would result in a monetary judgment.' More articles by John Kingston Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting New Mack long-haul truck makes grand entrance in bid for market share ATBS says independent drivers earned a little more in '24 but drove more as well The post Another circuit weighs broker liability, boosting odds of Supreme Court review appeared first on FreightWaves.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Freight fraud everywhere, but Truckstop CEO asks: Is anybody going to jail?
SAN ANTONIO – In the midst of an industry meeting of freight brokers who talked about freight fraud at every opportunity, Kendra Tucker made an interesting observation: She knows of no fraud perpetrators who ever found themselves in handcuffs. 'What I get a lot of are anecdotes from our customers about how cargo was stolen, the lengths to which people are going to steal it,' Tucker, the CEO of Truckstop, said in an interview at the company's booth on the exhibition floor of the Capital Ideas Conference of the Transportation Intermediaries Association. 'What you don't hear are stories about how this was punished.' And to make that happen, Tucker said, there will need to be a concerted effort on the part of the industry across companies and associations. 'I think it has to do with the issue not rising to the level of enough people as a group being hurt for the right dollar amount to get the FBI to really look at it and try to help us,' she added. Truckstop, known primarily for its freight-matching loadboard, has made being out in front of the fraud issue one of the most industry-facing strategies the company has undertaken. But Tucker suggested the company can't do it alone. The TIA itself talks about the issue regularly, and President Chris Burroughs, who rose to the top position last year, made it the core subject in his first address to the organization's biggest conference. But Tucker said the fight against fraud needs to be more collaborative. 'I was talking with TIA about this, and there really is an opportunity for brokers, carriers and shippers, who are all impacted by this, to come together with people like us and other key players in the industry, to decide how we want to approach it within the industry, so that we can have a cohesive approach to it,' she said. Such a step would involve bringing in the Department of Transportation and other government agencies to 'put some teeth on this.' And that gets back to how she opened the conversation: 'The reason fraud continues is because it isn't being prosecuted.' In conjunction with the TIA meeting, Truckstop released a report of a recent survey it did on the top issues facing the industry. According to the company, the top issue identified by brokers was 'finding a carrier you can trust.' Fraud is not new. But there is a consensus in the industry that it has exploded in recent years. Tucker, who became CEO in April 2022 but who joined Truckstop in August 2020, said her discussions with Truckstop customers have been consistent in saying that the fraud of the past few years most definitely is more pervasive than it was several years ago. But she said there is a parallel: what the industry went through during the great recession. 'That seems to track right where we're in, where we've been in a down cycle or down market that you see fraud really ticking up,' Tucker said. The difference this time from 2008 and 2009 is technology, she said. Two years ago at the TIA meeting, the buzzword was double brokering. It's a practice that can be legitimate if it is simply legal rebrokering: A broker assigns a load to a carrier who then reassigns it to another. There are instances in which that is acceptable under the terms of a contract. But beyond those situations, it can involve theft, late deliveries and service that violates the terms of a broker's agreement with a shipper, and a small loss on the cargo is a much lesser problem than cleaning up the mess afterward. But at the San Antonio TIA meeting, the conversation was about fraud in general. Tucker said the latest developments cover a wide range of categories: various digital activity, phishing emails, 'the actual stealing of freight at the docks and in the warehouses,' and the trafficking in legitimate motor carrier numbers bought from an owner willing to part with it for several thousand dollars. 'I think there have been so many technological advances since the great recession that fraud has been able to proliferate differently than it might have,' she said. Technology tools are available to the industry as well, Tucker said, 'but you have to think one step ahead of the fraudsters because for the nefarious actors, as soon as we find ways to prevent a certain type of fraud that's happening, new ways pop up.' The scam of fraudsters purchasing legitimate motor carrier authorities, usually from an unwitting seller, has become a big problem, Tucker said. As Tucker described it, the legitimate MC might have a clean record attached to it. But then if the MC number is not being actively used, the owner might stumble upon a Facebook page or other social media channel set up specifically for a scam artist to buy an MC. 'The pages say, 'We'll buy your MC for $15,000 or even $50,000,'' Tucker said. 'It is very active.' She noted that while there are more sophisticated tools that fraudsters can use rather than paying an unwitting seller for an MC, the purchase of a legitimate MC to pursue illegitimate ends relies on the seller being 'not educated enough and protective enough of their personal information.' When the scam hits, she said, the illegitimate activity will be tied to that MC number, with potentially long-lasting consequences for the person who sold it. 'Why would you sell your identity for any amount of money?' Tucker said. But here's the irony: For all the focus on fraud, the survey also found that it had declined in the past year. Tucker said Truckstop's own customers reported a 57% reduction in fraud between last year and this year. 'I'm not saying that fraud has gone away,' she said. 'I'm saying that for a good chunk of our customers, it is not at the peak that it was in '24 so that's very good.' Truckstop's own data is that last year, it blocked almost 13,000 entities that were trying to get on to the Truckstop load board but flunked the company's identity verification. That verification includes needing to present a driver's license as a basic first-step test. Beyond that, Tucker said, there is a multifactor authentication that includes a review by the company's 'security and assurance team.' Over recent years, Tucker said, that team has blocked more than 70,000 entities trying to get on to the loadboard as a broker, carrier or shipper from making it on to Truckstop's platform. 'We've got an actual team of humans; some of our highest tenured staff at Truckstop work on that team,' Tucker said. That enables them to address head-on the survey's biggest concern about a broker being able to trust the carrier that it hired. 'Our customers tell us consistently that they've never gotten a fraudulent carrier from us,' Tucker said. 'So nothing is 100% sure, of course, but very consistently, we get really positive feedback from our customers about how much they trust us.' More articles by John Kingston Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting New Mack long-haul truck makes grand entrance in bid for market share ATBS says independent drivers earned a little more in '24 but drove more as well The post Freight fraud everywhere, but Truckstop CEO asks: Is anybody going to jail? appeared first on FreightWaves.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting
SAN ANTONIO – What became obvious in more than three hours of legacy companies and wet-behind-the-ears startups touting technology solutions for 3PLs at the Transportation Intermediaries Association's meeting is that artificial intelligence is absolutely real right now, and one of the next battles will be over what might be called the last mile of technology. The presentations came during a Media Day at the TIA's annual Capital Ideas Conference, a day before the full launch of the largest gathering of freight brokers. One by one, nearly 20 companies laid out the capabilities of new or near-new technologies and capabilities they had launched to serve the 3PL industry. While it was clear that the capabilities of generative AI are no longer the technology of the future and very much part of the present, it was just as obvious that the overlap of what many of these solutions do, which has always been a feature of technology products aimed at the supply chain, doesn't go away in the AI world. That's where the 'final mile' comes in, those small capabilities that the tech suppliers look to create to differentiate themselves from what is already becoming a crowded field. For example, several presentations touted applications that would use AI to intake the never-ending stream of emails, text messages and phone calls a brokerage receives from drivers, other carrier employees or shippers. The new tools can use generative AI to formulate a response that meets the queries of the supply chain without consuming brokers' time, leaving them to more productive tasks. So far, there is no shortage of companies offering this service. David Bell, the founder and CEO of CloneOps AI, whose company presented at the Media Day, said the unusual name of his startup – which launched its product in conjunction with the conference – came from the oft-heard wish that during times of worker overload, some of a company's more productive employees could be cloned. 'Your emails are stacking up, your phone calls are on hold, your voicemail is getting full, your texting is getting full, and you're a one person show trying to keep your head above water,' Bell said in an interview with FreightWaves, describing the situation that several companies face. But with other companies offering similar AI products that take in communications and respond to them without human intervention when possible, the question to Bell was, how do you separate yourself from the pack? How does your last mile differ from that of others? Bell spoke of his experience as the owner of Smith Cargo, a consolidator, and then the founder of Lean Solutions (which also presented at Media Day.) But it wasn't just his background, Bell said. For example, he boasted of CloneOps' voice identification capabilities, which he said 'is going to prevent fraud right from the start.' If a call comes in from a 'fake carrier trying to get a load, it's going to identify if they're authorized to speak and if they're authorized to book a load on behalf of the carrier.' The goal, Bell said, is to 'create a bad actors database of the voices that are actually stealing the loads.' ParadeAI attended the conference but wasn't a presenter at TIA Media Day. However, its AI-driven offering is not duplicated by any of the companies that did present, as its capabilities involve using AI to provide what it calls capacity management. ParadeAI, which founder and CEO Anthony Sutardja said launched in 2019, uses a variety of tools to develop a reservoir of information about carriers that AI then can use to provide information to brokers looking to secure capacity. At its launch, Sutardja said, it used truck list emails to populate its data. 'We took the natural language processing technology that existed back then to start structuring it into available trucks for matching,' he said. 'That was one way of getting capacity,' he said. With the addition of more FreightTech solutions being adopted by brokers, Sutardja said, all of them create further sources of capacity that can then be interpreted by AI to give a broker a look at available capacity that might be a match for the lane that is seeking trucking services. The new features launched in conjunction with the TIA meeting are marketed under a product called CoDriver. The capabilities recently launched were described by Sutardja as a 'voice AI agent that can help have a conversation between the broker and carrier to discuss an available load, check if the carrier is qualified and check if it meets the load requirements.' While capacity management capabilities are the core of ParadeAI's business, it also has a pricing product called Advantage. ParadeAI and CloneOps both had booths on the TIA exhibition hall floor, which is dominated by FreightTech companies. CloneOps was also the sponsor of the conference's Wi-Fi; its brand marketing popped up whenever an attendee accessed that service. OTR Solutions has multiple financial tools for the industry, including factoring and fuel cards. COO Grace Maher introduced OTR 365, which she called an 'always-on network of interconnected financial products delivering intelligent solutions and powerful technologies.' What this means for drivers getting paid, she said, is 'no more cutoff times for same-day funding, no more weekend or bank holiday delays.' Pallet's AI solution is in the already crowded field of companies using AI to process and aid in what Jason Feng of the company's marketing team described as automation of 'any sort of repetitive workflow, including order entry, RFQ processing, track-and-trace and reconciliation.' Its product is called Copilot. The role of AI 'agents,' essentially human-like robots with an element of a personality, came up several times during TIA Media Day. At TMS provider Revenova, the agent's name is Artimus, introduced earlier this year. Marketing manager Mike Marut said the main strength of AI agents is that they can be tailored to the capabilities of a brokerage. 'It's customized and configured to what you do in your operational processes, but it's going to be different from everybody else,' he said. Michael Caney of Highway spoke about an upgrade to the company's visibility solution that combines it with the company's security validation, which is at the heart of Highway's rapid success in the market so far. It helps answer a key question that brokers need to answer to fight fraud: 'Are they [the carrier] within the geographic location of the load that they're looking at?' One company whose AI-driven product didn't have any obvious matches was Qued. Based on the pitch from President Tom Curee, it also is focused on using AI to help manage the stream of communications, but its focus was on one particular task: appointments. 'Imagine all these different appointments that have to be scheduled,' he said. 'They're in web portals, they're in emails or phone calls.' The AI solution at Qued is designed to tackle that with new technology. Crum & Foster rolled out new ways of accessing its TripExcess insurance offering that sells insurance to cover a high-value load whose value exceeds the coverage in a carrier or broker's insurance policies. Fleetworks introduced a solution that involves AI-produced conversations that can take the place of human interaction with phones and email for more routine tasks. Its new product also involves an AI-driven tool that can speak multiple languages. Freight Claims is a new company that will use AI and machine learning to produce automated workflows dealing with claims, which founder and CEO Mike Schember said was 'the last department to get any resources in any organization.' Get Real Rates, according to its co-founder Omar Singh, is using automation to generate rate information, 'fast forwarding automation that I thought was going to happen years ago, but it's taken a little bit longer.' Alfonso Quijano, CEO of Lean Solutions, introduced StudioQ. TalentQ is the first application under the StudioQ set of AI-driven solutions that Quijano said give its customers an 'unprecedented level of visibility to access talent.' It also aids in the onboarding process 'from start to finish, ensuring your new hire is fully prepared to thrive in their role,' Quijano said. CEO Dawn Favier, fresh off the company's announced planned acquisition by Triumph Capital (NASDAQ: TFIN), said her company will be adding an AI-driven product, Intuition. 'Pricing long-term freight contracts has always been a major challenge in the freight industry,' she said. Using AI and drawing on historical data, Intuition will build market forecasts on lanes out to 12 months in advance, greatly speeding up a broker's ability to respond to a longer-term RFP as opposed to the spot market. Happy Robot is rolling out Bridge, 'a control panel to run the operations across your entire business,' Catherine Dean said in presenting the product. Bridge, she said, 'is like a connection point between your teams and your businesses, shared knowledge and task execution.' Steve Kochan of HaulPay discussed his company's financing activities, which involve factoring and payments among other services, with a special focus on fighting fraud. He was presenting at Media Day because of the first update of the company's app and user interface in more than six years. Among the presentations by so many new companies was a veteran: Infinity Software Solutions, a TMS provider in business for 25 years. CEO Josh Asbury said the company was taking a 'big swing' in introducing WorkerOS, which he described as 'unifying all the different data, all the different data streams that workers have, the different data pipelines, into a common pool of data.' Another veteran company that presented was McLeod Software. Its new AI product is It was described as McLeod's first AI solution, and its functionality is targeted at what already looks like a crowded field: processing voluminous levels of all types of communication. Rose Rocket's TMS has added its own human-named feature, Ted, to its system, which was introduced earlier this year. It's another entry into the battle for cleaning up communications like emails that pour into brokerages every day. 'You get reduced time spent on manual entry by up to 20%, and new users of Rose Rocket will onboard onto our system 70% faster,' field marketing manager Neena Salifu said of Ted. David Ely, chief product officer at broker-focused Tai Software, used the word 'flexibility' to describe his company's new offering, which was introduced at the TIA. Tai believes, Ely said, that brokers are 'forced to work around preset work flows, fixed fields, static period logic, and it makes true automation impossible without costly development.' The flexibility he said is being built into Tai will 'let them define their business rules, trigger automated workloads and adapt the platform to fit their unique operations.' Michael Davidian, the vice president of business operations at TrueNorth, introduced Loadie, its 'virtual dispatcher' that takes information posted to the company's load board and seeks to use AI to match it with a carrier. 'Our AI doesn't just wait,' Davidian said. 'It works to match loads with quality carriers in real time, and the broker can specify what type of carriers match to that broker's load. This can be based on authority compliance criteria, past relationships with that broker and a variety of other customizable factors.' More articles by John Kingston Fighting freight fraud an immediate focus at annual meeting of brokers' group New Mack long-haul truck makes grand entrance in bid for market share ATBS says independent drivers earned a little more in '24 but drove more as well The post Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting appeared first on FreightWaves.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fighting freight fraud an immediate focus at annual meeting of brokers' group
SAN ANTONIO – The one consistent theme in opening addresses at the Capital Ideas Conference of the Transportation Intermediaries Association was that freight fraud remains a major problem for brokers, and there are few signs of progress in combating it. Two years after then-TIA President Anne Reinke described double brokering as 'out of control,' none of the three TIA officials who spoke at this year's gathering gave any hint that fraud is on the decline. Reinke's comments in 2023 were directed at double brokering; this year it was fraud in general, of which double brokering is one part. The meeting here with more than 1,500 attendees is the first for Chris Burroughs as president of the TIA. He moved into the top slot last September after Reinke took over leadership of the Intermodal Association of North America. Burroughs, in his first remarks to a TIA conference as president, said the organization has been 'tackling this problem' since the 2012 passage of a federal antifraud law. He noted it was one of the first pieces of legislation he had worked on at TIA after joining the organization that year. Nonetheless, Burroughs said, 'the situation has obviously exploded into a massive fraud.' 2020 data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said that the agency had more than 80,000 complaints of freight fraud in its database, a figure Burroughs said was 'staggering and quite frankly unexpected.' 'It's tarnishing our industry and our reputation,' he said. He cited a list of actions TIA has taken that have no enforcement mechanism but do raise the profile of the freight fraud issue: a task force, 'best practices' brokers can follow to reduce the amount of fraud, white papers, work with other organizations and the launch of a media campaign 'to continue to raise awareness on this issue.' 'We're also working directly with Congress and the federal agencies to push forward and getting regulations that are already on the books enforced,' Burroughs said. Rob Kemp, the president and founder of K-R Sales Inc. and DRT Transportation and incoming chair of the TIA, said he recently had a frustrating experience in his own company's battle with fraud. 'We just had a situation not too long ago. We ended up calling the FBI and were disappointed to hear the FBI say, and you guys have probably heard this, 'We can't help you.' So if they can't help you, who can help you?' Kemp said. Mark Christos, the president of SolvLogix Inc. and outgoing chair of the TIA, opened the conference with a push for the TIA as a bulwark against fraud. 'Every time I've been on the phone with a shipper or a prospective customer who has reservations about something really unfortunate that happened with them, relative to brokerage, I find that it's not with a TIA member,' Christos said. 'Same thing with the carrier side. They will tell us stories, all legitimate. I will ask the carrier, who is that with specifically? And they'll all say it is not a TIA member.' Burroughs also took the opportunity to tamp down the view that brokers and carriers are at odds with each other. Perceptions of that relationship hit bottom in spring 2020, when in the face of extremely low rates soon after the pandemic started, truckers took to the streets of Washington to protest the low levels and blamed brokers. Bob Voltmann, who had the TIA head job before Reinke, made a stunning short video defending his members. He was ousted soon after, and it was never clear whether the video was the cause of his departure. Tensions between the two groups may be arising again over the issue of broker transparency, with the FMCSA recommending new regulations. 'Carriers and brokers obviously need each other,' Burroughs said. He did not mention the broker transparency regulations but said that 'instead of trying to expose this sensitive business data, we should focus on the real issues, building trust, enhancing efficiencies and strengthening our partnerships together. Brokers don't survive without carriers.' 'We don't want to be enemies, but when bad policy threatens our industry, we will obviously stand up,' he added. More articles by John Kingston New Mack long-haul truck makes grand entrance in bid for market share ATBS says independent drivers earned a little more in '24 but drove more as well Truck driver triumphs at Supreme Court in case involving marijuana testing The post Fighting freight fraud an immediate focus at annual meeting of brokers' group appeared first on FreightWaves.
