Honda: Data Entry and Program Errors Caused Underreporting of Injury or Death Claims
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Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Honda said on Monday that it had vastly underreported claims involving accidents that resulted in injuries or deaths between 2003 and 2014.
In a news release regarding a third-party audit of the company’s early warning reports provided to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Honda said that it had alerted the NHTSA to the concern, prior to providing “responsive information” on Monday.
The audit found a total of 1,729 claims that Honda failed to report to NHTSA. The company blamed these failures on data entry errors, coding errors and narrow regulatory interpretation.
Vehicle manufacturers are required to report an array of information each quarter to ensure that the NHTSA is aware of any claims that could signal a potential safety defect. Included in that information is any claim involving an injury or death.
Honda says that it often did not enter a date into a field in its own database requesting “written claim received.” By not including that date, the system failed to “distinguish reportable written claims and notices from non-reportable oral claims for relief. The company also said that the computer program it used to generate early warning reports was not properly set up and that it had used an “overly narrow interpretation of what constituted a ‘written notice,'” resulting in a failure to report certain claims.
Honda says it will correct the setup of its computer program, ensure the inclusion of all claims involving injury or death in future early warning reports and improve training and oversight, in addition to other actions, in an effort to prevent such failures in the future.
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