Roadside inspections
Record the CVSA reports you receive, and see what an audit would make of them.
Every time one of your units is inspected at the roadside you are handed a report. Fleet → Roadside & Collisions is where those go. It is the one part of a facility audit you cannot produce out of your own filing cabinet — the report comes from the jurisdiction — so until you enter them, an audit has nothing from you on the subject.
An audit compares your inspection count against a table, and only Level I (the full inspection) and Level V (vehicle only, no driver) count towards it. Level III driver checks do not, however many you have. This is the piece most carriers have backwards, and it means a yard full of clean Level III stops does not move the number.
Recording one
Enter the date, the level, the unit and driver, where it happened and the report number off the paper — that number is how you and an auditor refer to the same inspection. Mark whether the vehicle or the driver was placed out of service.
A clean inspection is worth recording too. It is evidence in your favour, and it counts towards the number an audit expects to see.
What should have caught it
For each defect, say what should have found it first: your maintenance program, the driver’s trip inspection, or neither because it arose in service. This is your conclusion rather than something we can work out — the same defect can be a missed service on one unit and a genuine in-service failure on another.
It matters because an audit scores those separately. A defect your maintenance should have caught is a preventative maintenance finding; one the driver should have seen on a walk-around is a trip inspection finding; and one defect can honestly be both.
The Level V question
A Level V happens with no driver present, often in your own yard. An out-of-service defect found on one only counts against you once the unit can be shown to have been on a highway recently, or ready for dispatch. The screen asks, and leaving it unanswered holds the defect back rather than scoring it either way — so answer it and the question is closed rather than open.
If you have had fewer inspections than the table suggests, that is a note about how much evidence exists, not a mark against you. You do not choose how often you get stopped.
Related articles
Run the facility audit on yourself: how many files an auditor would pull, which ones, and what they would find.
Declare the maintenance schedules you run, and see where every unit stands and whether its file would survive a facility audit.
Turn on Fleet if you run commercial vehicles, and tell it which rules apply to you.