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Seminole County Jail

The owner of a Florida driver-training school has pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a scheme to produce Florida driver licenses and to help students who don’t speak English cheat on tests to obtain commercial driver licenses.

The plea by Ellariy Medvednik on Sept. 24 is the latest in a series of prosecutions as part of a nationwide crackdown on CDL fraud by the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Since 2011, the OIG has opened 10 CDL fraud investigations in six states. In Pennsylvania, the agency uncovered a scheme in which school officials helped Russian immigrants obtain CDLs by supplying them with false residency documents and interpreters who gave students answers while they were taking tests.

The Florida scheme was uncovered when officials from the Florida Highway Patrol and the Orange County Tax Collector Office noticed that several hundred people applying for CDLs used the same address in Seminole County. The address was the principal place of business for Larex Inc., a truck driver-training school operated by Medvednik.

Larex charged students between $1,800 and $5,000 to obtain a Florida CDL and arranged for students to complete the basic skills and road test by using a single third-party testing contractor.

At least 400 students obtained fraudulent CDLs in Florida, officials said.

In July, FMCSA issued new CDL testing rules that include a requirement to verify the applicant’s legal status and a prohibition against using interpreters as part of the test process.

“The knowledge test . . . can be administered in a foreign language, provided no interpreter is used in administering the test,” the regulation states. “Interpreters are prohibited during the administration of skills tests. Applicants must be able to understand and respond to verbal commands and instructions in English by a skills test examiner.”

States also are required to conduct background checks on CDL examiners and covertly monitor the activities of test examiners, according to the new rules.

Despite the efforts to stamp out fraud, federal investigators say they see ever more-sophisticated schemes being used to thwart the system.

In New York, for example, a driving school owner provided applicants with covert camera equipment and instructed them to point the camera, concealed in their jacket sleeves, at a test question so it could be seen and answered remotely.

In another case, schools used pencils containing miniaturized encoded test answers, a Bluetooth headset to relay CDL test answers and an external test taker positioned nearby to complete the exams.

States are responsible for developing a knowledge and skills test that demonstrates drivers understand and can follow federal motor carrier safety laws. To pass knowledge tests, applicants must correctly answer at least 80% of the questions.

Officials from the OIG said the agency’s audit of CDL programs since 2000 shows that more oversight is needed to stop fraudulent activity.

In addition to overseeing testing programs, states need to do a better job of updating information about driving violations. Delays in posting the data make it harder to suspend or revoke commercial driver licenses in a timely manner, the agency said.