The mission of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is to reduce large truck and bus crashes, fatalities, and injuries nationwide. In the early 1980s, the FMCSA introduced the Compliance Review (CR), a three-to-four day on-site examination of a motor carrier's operation to determine a carrier's compliance with the safety fitness standards. The carrier was then issued a safety rating of Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory.

Ten years later, the FMCSA released SafeStat, an online database to measure the safety of motor carriers in four safety evaluation areas: accident, driver, vehicle, and safety measurement. SafeStat analyzes data, including out-of-service violations and selected moving violations, from state and federal sources to identify potentially high-risk motor carriers. It then prioritizes carriers for a CR.

The study by the Government Accountability Office in 2007 estimated 5,500 people die each year as a result of crashes involving large commercial trucks or buses and about 160,000 more are injured. There were an estimated 724,000 active interstate truck and bus companies in 2007. Currently, federal and state investigators conduct compliance reviews on only two percent of the total motor carrier population each year.