DOT fights fraud with consolidated registration system, erasing data silos

Motor carriers are already taking advantage of the Department of Transportation’s newly launched one-stop shop for registration needs. The platform, called Motus, was a massive modernization effort that aimed to erase decades of data silos, reduce tech fragmentation and fight fraud. 

More than 50,000 motor carriers have registered since the platform launched Tuesday, and 1,000-plus were tallied in the first hour, according to Ankur Saini, chief product and technology officer for several DOT units including the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

“There was a lot of demand from the trucking industry for this to happen for not just the past six months, but for years,” Saini told FedScoop. “If you wanted to open up your own trucking company, or if you wanted to function as a motor carrier, you had to navigate a labyrinth of technology systems to register with us and to maintain registration.” 

As the Motus platform was being built, teams had the customer experience in mind. The multitude of systems built up over time were not developed with the “human-centered design that we all talk about these days,” he said. 

“We want to make it easy for somebody to file an update, change their address, change their telephone number and fill in compliance paperwork,” Saini said. “We’ve tried to build systems that speak everybody’s language.” 

Even as the agency worked to streamline the registration process, teams needed to add some steps if they wanted to fight fraud. 

Bad actors were known to take advantage of the silos and fragmentation. It was a low lift on their end, needing only an email, name and physical address. Meanwhile, DOT struggled to capture the full picture of a carrier. 

“In our world, fraud is a safety problem,” Saini said. 

As part of the new system, registrants will encounter several identity verification steps, starting with accessing or creating an account via Login.gov, a secure sign-on service created by the General Services Administration. After logging in, registrants will go through an additional verification process with biometrics provider Idemia, the vendor supporting a number of other government services, including the Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck. Businesses that are registering will use Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR, which uses data analytics to comb through public records. 

“This is very much helping us in our pursuit of reducing and eliminating fraud from the trucking ecosystem,” Saini said. “Motus is definitely a step in the right direction.”

More than 60 people had a hand in creating the platform, from members of legal and business to dedicated development staff. The bulk of the work was done within an 18-month period. Most of that time was spent cleaning up the data environment, Saini said. The patchwork system had allowed different standards to fester, so decoding disparate streams of information and deciding the authoritative source took time. 

“This is a one-of-a-kind event, and as I put it to my team, ‘nobody will ever work on this again,’” Saini said. “The next time this happens, people are going to be replacing one system with another system. We actually collapsed capabilities that were spread out over five, six, seven different systems into one place.”