The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is giving an estimated 14,000 medical examiners two months to submit results from truck driver qualification exams taken between December 2017 and August 2018.
A cyberattack in late 2017 took down the “upload functionality” for the National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners (MEs). In a notice posted on its website, the agency said, “FMCSA is aware that while many MEs have submitted results of examinations conducted while the National Registry was offline, others still have not done so.”
Because FMCSA was worried the surge in uploads would overtax the system it has given MEs time to submit reports during the period in question. But, with increased capacity, the system is no longer limited and MEs have only until Sept. 30 to submit those missing exam results.
“Due to continued improvements to the National Registry system, FMCSA is no longer concerned about the increased activity of uploading results of examinations that occurred during the National Registry outage,” the notice said.
In a recent audit made public in January by the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), there was evidence of ongoing technical issues. The audit found the outage to be partly responsible for nearly half of the registry’s 70,208 ME records having outdated medical license information.
At the same time, however, it found, through a sample analysis from three state driver’s licensing agencies, that 21% of the exams were not recorded in the registry.
