Authors: U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO)

Date of Publication:  April 1989

Sponsoring Agency:  U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO)

Performing Organization:  U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO)

Report No: GAO/RCED-89-109

Abstract:

FRA uses injury and accident reports submitted by the railroads as a basis for planning and executing its safety programs and for assessing and reporting on the safety condition of the railroad industry. FRA, however, has little assurance that its injury and accident data base is reliable because the railroads GAO visited were not reporting accurately or completely. To the extent this situation extends to all railroads, FRA’s decisions on establishing its safety inspection and enforcement program strategy, determining its inspection level of effort, and calculating the costs and benefits of proposed safety rule changes could be adversely affected. Further, to the extent the data base is inaccurate, railroad safety may not be improving as much as FRA has reported.

The five railroads GAO visited were either (1) underreporting the number of injuries and accidents, (2) understating the number of lost workdays and the estimated cost of damages due to train accidents, or (3) in the case of one railroad, not maintaining sufficient information for GAO to determine the accuracy of its reporting. GAO found that:
 

• For 521 unreported injuries and 532 unreported accidents that GAO reviewed, 61 injuries and 52 accidents should have been reported to FRA.

• Of the 156 injuries involving lost workdays reported by four of the railroads that GAO reviewed, the number of lost workdays was underestimated by 269 percent.

• Of 171 accident cases GAO analyzed, the estimated cost of damages due to train accidents was understated by 52 percent, or $3.5 million.

FRA’s oversight of self-reporting by the railroads has not been sufficient to obtain consistently accurate injury and accident reports. Although the railroads generally had the necessary data available to report accurately, errors occurred because safety offices responsible for preparing reports were not collecting the most up-to-date information available from other sources before reporting to FRA. FRA’s inspectors usually focused their inspection efforts on detecting individual reporting errors rather than on a railroads procedures for reporting. The inspectors, therefore, were not detecting the underlying causes of inaccurate reporting.
 

No. of Pages:  37