Commercial License Fraud - Reader's Digest: July, 2007

Chicago Tribune; Monday, January 1, 2007

HEADLINE: Unskilled truckers rampant: Licensing fraud found in 24 states over last 5 years

BYLINE: Stephen Franklin and Darnell Little, Chicago Tribune

Jan. 1--Missouri officials recently were preparing to send a letter to truck driver Hussein Osman, asking him to retake his commercial driver's license test.

The reason: Missouri and federal agencies were investigating whether the driving school that Osman attended fraudulently helped provide licenses for several hundred truck drivers, many of them Somali and Bosnian immigrants.

But the 25-year-old Osman was dead before the letter went out.

He was killed in an Oct. 1 collision that also took the life of Oklahoma State Trooper William McClendon, 37. State police later said both the trucker's and the trooper's actions may have led to the crash.

There are thousands of drivers like Osman on the nation's highways who got their licenses under suspicious circumstances. In the last five years, the federal government has discovered licensing fraud in 24 states. The payment-for-license schemes usually center on so-called third-party examiners who are hired by states to perform driver testing.

As a federal judge in Chicago remarked during a license fraud case several years ago, some of these truckers can be likened to "10-ton torpedoes."

The judge's comments came in a case related to a federal and state investigation launched eight years ago in Illinois involving the sale of truckers' driver's licenses. That probe led to the conviction last year of former Gov. George Ryan on federal corruption charges, but also helped tip off investigators to licensing scams across the country.

Today the government has 21 ongoing investigations in 13 states, said Brian Dettelbach, a Transportation Department official in Washington, D.C.

The magnitude of the problem could be even greater because of laxity at the state level in testing and tracking licensed drivers, say investigators for the U.S. Transportation Department.

One state, for example, told federal investigators that there were "too many suspect drivers to list." Another state was unaware that a federal investigation of licensing fraud was under way. And five states that cited probes in their jurisdictions were unable to provide investigators with lists of drivers who obtained licenses in suspected scams.

At one point the federal government tallied up 15,000 licenses nationally that it believed were obtained under suspicious circumstances. But it didn't have any details from the states on nearly 7,000 of those drivers. They have become highway ghosts, beyond detection and potentially dangerous.

"As a result, unskilled drivers could be operating commercial vehicles on the nation's highways, creating significant risks for death, injury and property damage," said a report last February from the U.S. Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General.

A hurdle facing the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that oversees trucking safety, is its belief that it cannot force states to locate drivers with suspicious licenses.

"We will work with the states to contact these drivers and either retest or downgrade them, but we will not compel them," Ian Grossman, a spokesman for the safety administration, said in an e-mail.

In contrast, the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General thinks the agency does have that power.

A matter of priority

Jason King, a spokesman for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, which represents state authorities across the U.S., said states do work with the federal agency to root out unqualified drivers.

But "among the many things on a state's list of priorities, going after suspect fraudulent licenses may not be No. 1," King said.

The quandary over what to do with drivers with questionable training is worrisome to Todd Spencer, an official with the Missouri-based Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents about 120,000 truck drivers.

"The system allows unqualified people to gain access to big trucks," said Spencer. Raising the specter of terrorism, Spencer said the system's loopholes "create an open invitation that could be exploited by those who want to cause us great harm."

Commercial driving license fraud has been a growing headache since the industry began to deregulate more than two decades ago. Since 1980, the number of interstate trucking firms has shot up to 564,000 from 20,000. Today there are more than 1.5 million truckers, up 200,000 from 2002, according to trucking industry estimates.

Lured by the image of good-paying jobs, people have scampered to obtain commercial driving licenses. And entrepreneurs and crooks sprang into action to help would-be drivers sidestep obstacles.

A grasp of the depth of the problem came when federal and state investigators in 1998 began looking into the licenses-for-sale scandal in Illinois.

Ultimately, their work led to a 6 1/2-year prison term for former Gov. Ryan on federal corruption charges, convictions of more than 75 people and the retesting of more than 1,000 truckers. The exams were completed by 2000.

The probe also showed that unskilled drivers were on the highways. At least nine people, including one trucker, have died in crashes involving truckers who allegedly got their licenses illegally in Illinois, according to federal officials.

The first occurred in 1994 when the Willis family's van was struck by a piece of metal from the truck of a driver who allegedly got his Illinois license as a result of bribes. Six children died in the fiery crash on a Milwaukee-area highway.

In 2002 federal investigators warned that nearly half the states were not properly monitoring third-party testing. This is an issue because the majority of states rely on a mix of state and private testers while just a handful use only state employees for testing. There are seven states where all truck licensing is handled privately.

In Macon, Ga., for example, the owner of a truck driving school worked out a deal with a third-party tester to falsify tests for 623 students over several years, federal officials said in 2004. And when Georgia officials retested the drivers who already had been on the roads for several years, it determined that only 142 were qualified to keep their licenses.

Illinois probe triggers others

Sandra Lambert, head of Florida's Division of Driver Licenses, acknowledged concerns about private testers but said they provide nearly all the truck driving tests in her state.

"Unless we were given hundreds more positions, we would not be able to handle the volume [of applicants]," Lambert said.

It wasn't until the late 1990s that Florida officials realized licensing fraud was a problem, and it was triggered by the probe in Illinois, she said.

Federal investigators were led to Florida after they received a tip from a state worker in Illinois that a large number of truckers with Florida licenses were coming to Illinois to swap their Florida licenses for Illinois licenses.

In turn, Florida investigators discovered that many of those drivers had obtained licenses at a Tampa school that was churning out licenses with almost no testing, said Lambert. The scam involved hundreds of Russian and European immigrants who didn't even reside in Florida, prosecutors said at the time.

The drivers were relying on reciprocity agreements, in which most states accept out-of-state truckers' licenses without any new testing.

Since then, Florida has called in 12,500 truck drivers who got their licenses through third-party testers who broke the law. Lambert said the majority of those drivers opted to surrender their licenses.

Despite Florida's efforts to keep closer tabs on examiners, the scams continue.

"Where there is a profit to be made, we do see more fraud," Lambert said.

Last June, for example, Florida shut down a truck driving school near Orlando that officials say may have illegally launched more than 2,000 drivers. Florida authorities were alerted to the school when its records showed that it had not failed any test takers in more than a year and a half.

Typically when a state makes its testing more difficult, authorities say, drivers will seek out other states with easier tests. That's what happened when Illinois began requiring drivers to take their tests only in English in November 1999.

As a result, hundreds of immigrants from Illinois began claiming false residences in Wisconsin and used translators to take license tests there. In some cases, authorities said, bribes were passed on to third-party testers to guarantee licenses. The price was $2,000, officials said.

One of the drivers who obtained a Wisconsin license was Nasko Nazov, 46, a Macedonian from suburban Chicago.

While Nazov was driving for a Chicago-area firm, his truck slammed into two cars snarled in a traffic jam on an interstate highway in Tennessee in March 2004, killing a husband and wife and their two young children.

The crash occurred just a year after he had received his license in Wisconsin, according to officials there. He was later convicted in Chicago of lying to a federal grand jury investigating the commercial driver's license fraud in Wisconsin and given a 10-month prison term.

A judge in Tennessee last year gave Nazov, who had pleaded guilty to various charges related to the fatal crash, a 4-year prison term. Out of 600 driver's licenses that Wisconsin investigators linked to various scams, Nazov's was the only one connected to a fatal crash, said officials with the Wisconsin Division of Motor Vehicles.

In Missouri, federal prosecutors in September filed mail fraud charges against 15 people, including the owner of a truck driving school in West Plains, Mo., the owner of one in Kansas City and a private tester.

Anatomy of a scam

They were tied together in obtaining 300 fraudulent licenses, according to federal prosecutors. As many as 200 of these drivers later were licensed to haul hazardous waste, prosecutors said.

As part of the original licensing scam, drivers were given answers to written tests, or took shorter versions, or arranged for other people to take the tests for them, according to a statement in September by Bradley Schlozman, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri. A few drivers passed without ever being there, he said.

Some of the drivers were from other states, including Osman, who lived in Columbus, Ohio. The fact that many of the Missouri school's students were from elsewhere, including Illinois, points to a bigger problem, said Terry Montalbano, head of Illinois' commercial driver's license program.

"People run to the weakest link," said Montalbano, explaining that some drivers will seek out states where testing is weak, where testers can be bribed or where driving schools are not regulated.

That strategy no longer works in Illinois, state officials said, since the state started retesting all out-of-state truckers seeking an Illinois license. As for third-party testers, state officials say they conduct only a small fraction of exams here.

Missouri has also tightened its controls. In August, the state passed a law that essentially cuts back on the reliance of third-party testers. Traditionally about one-fourth of the trucker exams there have been carried out by third-party testers.

Similarly, Missouri officials say they have been on the alert for fraud, and that is why, they add, they did not wait until the school where Hussein Osman trained was charged before ordering retests of its graduates.

All together Missouri has identified 1,958 drivers since July 2005 with licenses from schools under state or federal investigation and ordered them to be retested, said Maura Browning, an official with the Missouri Department of Revenue, which oversees truckers' licenses

Out of these, 724 drivers have left Missouri, and the state has notified the other states about the drivers' questionable licenses. But Browning didn't know what has since happened to the out-of-state drivers.

That, she said, is up to the other states.