Plan for a minimum of three business days for most OSW permits

The Indiana Department of Revenue (DOR) is asking motor carriers to allow additional time for the Motor Carrier Services department (MCS) to review and issue oversize/overweight permits.

Summer is peak season for both carrier permitting requests and Indiana road construction. The combination of these two realities introduces higher levels of permit volume and complexity, resulting in extremely high-volumes of permits that have to be manually processed by the MCS and Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) permitting teams.

DOR is advising customers that most basic permits are issued within three business days. Permits with complex routes or routes which require INDOT district approval or an Indiana State Police escort will take additional time to process.

“Standard routes can be used for only about 40% of OSW permit applications,” explained Motor Carrier Services Director Randal Boone. “Complex routes, including when a route is under construction, requires MCS permitting specialists to utilize physical maps and other resources to manually analyze the load and route to develop a safe alternative. In some cases, this takes up to three times longer than our normal process.”

MCS permitting team members are currently working extra hours to manually approve and issue almost 1,200 permits and answer approximately 500 customer service inquiries daily.

“Our goal is to provide great customer service while ensuring permits are accurate and correct in order to protect our transportation infrastructure. Providing our team more time by building additional processing time in your logistics will greatly assist our teams,” said Boone. Boone also notes that OSW permits are worked in the order in which they are submitted.

To reduce the chances of a permit being delayed or rejected, applicants are encouraged to plan or check their route on the INDOT Truckers’ Info website, http://intr.carsprogram.org before applying for a permit. Taking the extra time to ensure all permit data is entered correctly in the permit application also avoids rejects and manual reviews.

DOR and INDOT are partnering on a new permitting system that will introduce service and speed improvements. The new solution will support new self-service options, and most standard and alternate routing permits will be issued automatically. The new Indiana Oversize/Overweight Permitting System is currently in the final stages of development and testing. It is currently scheduled to launch this winter.

For more information on OSW permits, please see in.gov/dor/mcs.htm.