TSA Publishes 2017 Surface Enforcement Summary

Earlier this week the DHS Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published a notice in the Federal Register (83 FR 11236-11240) providing a summary of the enforcement actions that were undertaken in the surface transportation security realm for calendar year 2017. Looking at the results it is apparent that the TSA significantly stepped up its enforcement of the Transportation Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) program under 49 CFR 1570. For the second year in a row TSA reported no enforcement actions under the rail security provisions of 49 CFR 1580.

The table below shows a summary of the last four year’s enforcement activities. The total for this year’s report is a little overstated because there were twenty instances in this report where two or more violations were reported for a single incident.

	2014	2015	2016	2017
Did not allow TSA Inspection
Rail Car Chain of Custody	4	1
Rail Car Security
Rail Car Location	1
Reporting Security Concern	1	1
Use of another’s TWIC	8	5	4	15
Direct the use of another's TWIC		7	3	41
Fraudulent Manufacture of TWIC		2	5	8
Use of an altered TWIC		15	34	134
Total	14	31	46	198

The continued failure to report any railroad enforcement actions would tend to indicate that the TSA is effectively ignoring rail security issues. This is hardly surprising with the very small Surface Transportation Security inspection force and the very widely spread rail network. It is much easier to concentrate efforts in the fairly limited port areas of the country. What is disappointing however, it the apparent failure to look at rail security operations in the port areas where the inspection forces are apparently concentrated.

In previous years reporting (see here for example) I tried to summarize the information provided on fines proposed and assessed. This year, with the huge increase in the reported incidents, I have not attempted to do so. Most of the incidents reported resulted in just warnings being issued. The largest fine proposed this year was $6,000 and the largest actually assessed was $2,000. With the violations being typically assessed against individuals rather than commercial organizations, these figures are probably reasonable.

One final point that is interesting in this TSA report; the file numbering system that TSA uses to track their surface transportation security enforcement activities. It consists of a four-digit year number, a three-character city code, and a four-number sequence code. The city code is the international airport code for the city involved instead of the 4-character code for the port involved. This is just another indication of the extreme airport bias of the TSA.