The gold envelopes were stuffed with wads of cash and couriered via UPS. Inside, each $520 to $530 bundle of bills was paper-clipped to a sticky note bearing the birthdate of a student seeking a commercial driver’s license in the state of Washington.
Regulators believe the money came from Skyline CDL School, an upstart truck-driving academy with branches in Washington and Oregon, they wrote in investigative reports. They believe it was paid to an independent state tester as part of an alleged bribery scheme to ensure the company’s students would fraudulently receive passing grades, the documents say.
Investigators last year identified scores of unqualified drivers who received their commercial licenses in Washington after Skyline steered students from its branches in Vancouver and Auburn hours away to the contract tester in Arlington, north of Seattle, the reports say. Some of the individuals licensed never tested at all, according to state records, and 80% of drivers who were later forced to retest failed their exams.
Washington regulators also determined that Skyline relied on unqualified instructors, falsified records, bypassed English proficiency standards, and failed to document training hours and students’ skills, documents show.
The alleged scheme has gone publicly unreported until now and allowed an untold number of unqualified drivers to pilot big rigs on the nation’s highways and byways, posing a major risk to the general public. It raises fundamental questions about how closely Washington and Oregon regulate one of the most hazardous professions in the country – and if all the drivers who fraudulently passed their exams have been taken off the road.
“That’s incredibly dangerous,” said Scott Turner, an expert witness and investigator who owns Florida-based Truck Accident & Incident Experts. “You’re putting drivers in the seat of an 80,000 pound commercial vehicle that don’t have the requisite experience or training.”
Turner said he investigates 100 crashes a year, and a large number of them involve drivers without the necessary knowledge or experience behind the wheel. Once licensed, they could be operating anywhere in the United States.
“You’re putting the motoring public at extreme risk,” he said.
The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained details of Washington’s investigation through a public records request that took state officials almost two months to fulfill. Regulators in Oregon only learned key details about it in response to inquiries by the newsroom.
The Washington Department of Licensing terminated its contract with the independent tester, Jason Hodson, last year. Officials suspended Skyline’s license to operate in the state on Dec. 31, and formally terminated it in March, preventing the company from teaching more students.
Washington has now pulled the credentials of 110 drivers tested by Hodson, including 102 from Skyline. Yet agency officials admit they can’t be sure they identified and acted on all the drivers they suspect may have been involved, including six who subsequently relinquished their Washington licenses in exchange for commercial licenses in Oregon.
Skyline CDL School has not been accused of wrongdoing in Oregon and its school in Hillsboro is still operating. But the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, which regulates private career schools in the state, fined Skyline $500 in March for failing to report the disciplinary actions in Washington. Officials say other enforcement actions may be pending.
Peter Reed, assistant administrator of the commercial driver license program at Washington’s Department of Licensing, said in an email that the agency has taken all regulatory actions authorized under state law. In addition, he said officials have had in-depth discussions about their findings with federal regulators and some conversations with the Washington State Patrol Commercial Vehicle Division.
“A case like this would have to be investigated by local police and referred to the county prosecutor for criminal charges,” he said. “No one from local or federal law enforcement has reached out to us, but we would fully cooperate in an investigation if they did.”
Skyline’s owner is listed as Pavlo Terpay, according to records from Washington’s Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board, which regulates training programs, while some records filed with Washington’s Secretary of State list the “governor” as Pavel Terpay. Oregon’s school is owned by Pavel Terpay and Vitaliy Velikiy, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission.
An individual who answered the phone last month at Skyline’s Hillsboro office said Velikiy left the school “a long time ago” and it has new ownership. She declined to identify herself or the new owners. The newsroom could not reach Velikiy for comment.
A person contacted on a mobile phone listed to Terpay insisted on communicating via text. The person responded that neither the school nor its board members were aware of or involved in the alleged payment scheme with Hodson.
“Not just didn’t do it. We had no idea it was happening behind our back. And state (sic) never proved anything,” the person responded. “If someone dropped the ball with Jason,” whom the state hired, the person added, “it’s (the Department of Licensing), not us.”
When contacted by the newsroom about the alleged bribery scheme, Hodson, who was interviewed by Washington investigators last September, said he’d left the state testing program voluntarily for family reasons.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said of the investigation. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I’ll leave it at no comment.”
Getting a license fast and cheap
So-called “CDL mills” – trucking schools that churn out large numbers of students with minimal training – are nothing new. The trucking industry is perennially starved for drivers, and such outfits offer low tuition for condensed courses, promise job placement, and often cater to specific ethnic groups by offering training in multiple languages.
Truckers even have a term for how inexperienced drivers end up on the roads. It’s called “getting your license out of a Crackerjack box,” said Turner, the Florida investigator.
Skyline CDL School operates out of a small, ranch-style house in Hillsboro. On a recent visit, the grass out front grew long and a shopping cart stood abandoned next to a small sign advertising the company’s website.
Online, Skyline boasts of the lowest tuition rates locally, flexible schedules and classes taught in languages such as English, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish and Spanish.
In November, Portland’s FOX affiliate, KPTV, ran a promotional video during its morning show that was “sponsored by Skyline CDL School.” During the nearly three-minute video, employees extolled the company, touting the intensity of the training programs, the ability to conveniently finance the $3,500 to $4,000 tuition for the month-long course, and the great career prospects for graduates.
“I would say 100% of our students hit the road as soon as they finish the school,” enthused Elizabeth Henson, who was identified as director of marketing for Skyline.
Education is just the first step. Entry level drivers are required to complete training from a provider registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Then a driver must use those skills and knowledge to pass a test to earn a license. More than 188,000 people in Washington and 92,000 in Oregon have commercial licenses.
Washington, like Oregon, outsources commercial testing to independent contractors. The test consists of a vehicle inspection by the driver, an assessment of their ability to safely maneuver and back up a truck, and a road test.
Officials with Washington’s Department of Licensing say they first began investigating possible problems at Skyline in July 2023 after the agency received a report that the school’s customers were testing and passing exams with third-party examiners without being properly qualified.
Officials visited its Washington branches and interviewed past Skyline students, none of whom reported giving money or having knowledge of payments, according to investigative reports. But investigators did identify a number of issues with the program.
Federal regulations require that commercial drivers demonstrate English proficiency in order to communicate with the public, understand highway traffic signs and signals, respond to official inquiries and make entries on reports and records. But most of the Washington students interviewed by investigators couldn’t speak or understand English, their report said.
There was no admission process at the Skyline branches in Washington to screen for English proficiency, customers told investigators – once you paid and turned in required documentation, you were in.
In Vancouver, the school had no process in place to ensure staff had active credentials, investigators reported. They identified potential problems such as one instructor who passed his own exam only a year earlier, a second who had a Florida driver’s license and lived in Oregon, and a third who couldn’t speak or understand English, the report said. Investigators wrote that files for both students and employees in Washington were incomplete and classroom training was mostly from videos and phone applications, not the state commercial driver’s manual.
And the school was steering students to a particular examiner, Hodson, for testing – a hardship for students in Vancouver that meant traveling four hours north, they wrote.
By October 2023, however, investigators documented no evidence of fraud, and wrote in a report that Skyline “is now working on improving their admission process.”
Andrew Lenderman, a spokesperson for the state’s workforce training board, said in an email that the board also “provided guidance and technical assistance on their admission policy in an effort to allow the school a chance to correct errors and achieve compliance. The errors were not corrected.”
Fraudulent results suspected
Skyline’s reprieve from scrutiny was short-lived.
In March 2024, Washington regulators received a new complaint from a Skyline student in Vancouver alleging that the company was forcing him to test hours away in Arlington. Auditors subsequently visited Hodson’s testing facility three times and, on each occasion, some or all of the drivers scheduled for testing failed to show up, and their exams were canceled or rescheduled, documents show.
Evaluators also noted that Hodson’s basic skills test course wasn’t set up properly, that he failed to conduct skills testing per established requirements, and made errors on testing paperwork. Meanwhile, his passing rate on the 2,150 various tests he’d administered in the previous 12 months was significantly higher than state averages, including passing 93% of students on road tests compared to 66% by other testers.
The audit report gave Hodson an overall performance rating of “marginal” and recommended a warning letter. But Reed, the assistant administrator of the agency, said in an interview that the no-shows “didn’t look right to our investigations team, so they pursued it further.”
Last September, agency investigators parked outside Hodson’s testing site on three separate occasions to document what was taking place.
During their first, nearly 8-hour stakeout, Hodson sat in his pickup and never interacted with anyone, records say. There was no movement around his test vehicles. He subsequently entered exam results for six individuals who purportedly tested that day, passing four of them, investigators wrote. On subsequent visits, much the same occurred. Hodson entered test results for another seven individuals who either weren’t there, or never completed a full test on that date, according to the state.
“Based on these entries, it is more likely than not that third party examiner Jason Hodson is entering fraudulent exam results for exams that never occurred,” investigators concluded in a report.
Investigators tried to contact each of the drivers in question, using translators to communicate with most of them. Some claimed they tested on different days than Hodson entered. Others insisted they’d tested on the day in question, then cut off contact when investigators told them they had photo and video evidence that they’d never been there.
Investigators also interviewed a witness who alleged Hodson was committing fraud, most of it involving Russian-speaking students at Skyline in Vancouver. The witness alleged the manager there, Velikiy, had been sending gold envelopes stuffed with cash to Hodson “for customers that will not actually be present for their exams” the report said. The witness provided photos of the envelopes shipped by United Parcel Service that listed the names of both men; numerous dates “when obvious fraud occurred;” a copy of a Google spreadsheet that was allegedly used by Hodson and Skyline to manipulate pass/fail rates in case the students’ high pass rates raised red flags with regulators; as well as screenshots of text messages from drivers who’d been contacted by investigators and were asking Hodson how they should respond, the report said.
Only the photos of envelopes and money were in records released to the newsroom by Washington officials.
Investigators subsequently interviewed Hodson by telephone, according to their report. When asked about entering test results for customers who were not at his test site, officials wrote that he responded: “That ain’t true. … I do not believe that happened. I may have accidentally written down the incorrect date on the test sheet. I am not sure if I have.”
Hodson told investigators he charged students $175 cash as the fee for administering exams, a fee set by the state. If regulators confronted Hodson about the wads of cash stuffed into envelopes, which appeared to average $525 per paper-clipped bundle, the report made no mention of it.
Reed, the assistant administrator, acknowledged that he doesn’t believe investigators asked Hodson about the payments. He cited concerns about the source of the information and a potential criminal investigation, even though officials now contend they have no direct means to refer the case to law enforcement.
“I know they were really careful about that because of how we got the information,” Reed said. “And at the time, we didn’t know if there was going to be a local criminal investigation or if there was even going to be, you know, FBI, Homeland Security involvement.”
The state’s investigation concluded that “Jason Hodson more likely than not has been accepting payments from Skyline CDL School in the form of cash … for passing scores for Skyline students.”
By the time of Hodson’s interview, he had already received two stop-work orders from the state and had resigned, requesting that officials terminate his contract, officials said. The Department of Licensing made it official in early October. Separately, Washington’s training board suspended Skyline’s accreditation on Dec. 31, writing in its order that the school’s conduct “constitutes a serious threat to the public health, safety, and welfare, and requires emergency action due to the risks of putting unskilled drivers on the road in large vehicles.”
Meanwhile, regulators retested some of Skyline’s students. The results weren’t pretty.
High failure rates
The Department of Licensing said it identified 877 drivers purportedly tested by Hodson between April 2023 and Sep. 15, 2024, 822 of them from Skyline.
Only 143, or 16% of those drivers, were selected for retesting, including 134 Skyline students. Regulators said they focused on only a small subset because of the resources involved, their best estimate of when the alleged scheme ramped up, and the potential hardship on drivers.
The first wave of tests was for the 13 Skyline students who didn’t show up for their scheduled tests when investigators were on site. The second was made up of 45 Skyline students who were named in witness reports or linked though payment records. And a third wave of 85 students was identified based on risk indicators such as recently obtaining a license, moving violations, driver fitness scores maintained by federal regulators and whether they trained with Skyline.
Of the 74 drivers who were eventually retested, 80% failed the exam. Others simply didn’t schedule or take the test. In all, the state canceled 110 driver’s credentials, 102 of them for Skyline students.
Thirteen of the drivers who were identified for re-testing had already transferred their license to other states, including six in Oregon, all of them Skyline students. Oregon does not require testing when a driver submits a valid license from another state.
Washington officials didn’t disclose the names of those drivers in the records obtained by the newsroom.
“While we cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that every unqualified driver has been identified, our approach is specifically designed to detect those most likely to have obtained their license improperly,” Washington’s licensing department said in answers to written questions.
Reed, the assistant administrator, said that trying to retest all the drivers examined by Hodson “would be colossally expensive and take a long time.”
“To be honest, we see this as a win,” he said, adding that the agency will be presenting its findings at a national meeting of state commercial driver’s license coordinators this month.
“It’s hard for most states to detect when fraud is going on,” he said. “That’s something we’ve been able to do.”
Oregon taking action
Oregon officials are now looking more closely into Skyline and its students after inquiries from The Oregonian/OregonLive.
While commercial driving schools in Oregon are regulated by the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, drivers are licensed by the division of Driver and Motor Vehicle Services.
Skyline was originally licensed in Oregon in 2023 and completed an annual renewal in August 2024. The commission received no complaints about Skyline in that time.
Kia Sorensen, private postsecondary education manager for the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, said the agency originally heard from another commercial driving school in January that Skyline had been suspended in Washington. But when officials followed up with their counterparts in that state, they were told Washington was actively investigating a third party tester, but no concerns were shared about Skyline, she said.
The commission was unaware of Washington’s investigation and suspension of Skyline’s license until contacted by the newsroom in late February, she said. Commission staff conducted a site visit in Hillsboro in March. They found no violations.
But Oregon administrative rules require owners of career schools to notify the commission within 10 days of any disciplinary action against the school. Career schools’ licenses can also be subject to suspension or revocation in cases involving the “commission of fraud, misrepresentation or deceit,” the rules say.
No timely notification of discipline took place, the commission said. The commission fined Skyline CDL School Portland $500 on March 4 for failing to report Washington’s action.
The rules also say that in the event of a change of ownership of a career school, the buyer or majority owner must report it to the commission 30 days in advance. Officials received a new ownership application, Sorenson said, but she declined to say when it was submitted or by whom.
Additional enforcement related to the school ownership is pending, Sorenson said.
Chris Crabb, a spokesperson for Oregon DMV, said the agency only learned from the newsroom about the six Skyline students who obtained licenses in Washington and exchanged them in Oregon.
Officials now have the names of the drivers and are looking into the matter.
“Normally, we do not have a reason to question the validity of the other state’s issuance process,” Crabb wrote in an email to the newsroom. “These circumstances, however, are not normal.”
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