DOT Office of Inspector General finds problems with NHTSA’s Ability to Investigate Vehicle Safety

An internal audit report  released June 18, 2015 from the Inspector General found that NHTSA fails to carefully review safety issues, hold automakers accountable for safety lapses, carefully collect vehicle safety data, and properly train or supervise its staff.  The Inspector reports the Office of Defects Investigation’s (ODI) processes for collecting vehicle safety data is insufficient to ensure complete and accurate data. Deficiencies in ODI’s vehicle safety data are a result of the Agency’s lack of detailed guidance on what information manufacturers and consumers should report. Without detailed guidance, decisions regarding key aspects of early warning reporting data are left to the manufacturers’ discretion, resulting in inconsistent data of little use to ODI investigative chiefs. The report goes on to say that ODI does not follow standard statistical practices when analyzing early warning reporting data. Consequently, ODI cannot differentiate trends and outliers that represent random variation from those that are statistically significant.

The audit also exposes ODI’s investigation decisions lack of transparency and accountability. Specifically, ODI does not always document the justifications for its decisions not to investigate potential safety issues and does not always make timely decisions on opening investigations. Seventeen recommendations are made in the report that are aimed at improving ODI’s processes for collecting and analyzing vehicle safety data and for determining which potential safety issues warrant investigation.

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