The Document Every Carrier Must Keep — That Almost No Broker Ever Asks For

The call came from plaintiff's counsel, not the carrier. A truck operated under MC-1247893 (DOT-3389742) had been in a serious rear-end crash on I-94 outside Gary, Indiana — family of four, two hospitalized. Six weeks before that crash, one of our clients had booked a load with that carrier. It wasn't their load, their truck, or their driver involved. But their name appeared in the carrier's broker list, and plaintiff's counsel was working backward through everyone who'd used them in the prior twelve months.

During discovery, plaintiff's lawyers asked the carrier to produce its accident register. The carrier produced it. Three incidents in the preceding eighteen months — none visible on SAFER, none triggering an FMCSA-reportable threshold. All three involved the same pattern: following too close, abrupt situation, rear-end contact. The record was right there, maintained by their own safety department. FMCSA just didn't have it.

My client had done a SAFER pull. They saw zero crashes. They proceeded. That's where this went sideways.

What 49 CFR § 390.15 actually requires

Under 49 CFR § 390.15(b), every motor carrier operating commercial motor vehicles must maintain an accident register for three years. The register must include every accident — as FMCSA defines the term: any occurrence involving a commercial motor vehicle that results in a fatality, a bodily injury requiring treatment away from the scene, or a vehicle disabled and towed from the scene.

That definition doesn't care about dollar amounts. It doesn't require a police report. It doesn't require the carrier to decide the accident was reportable to FMCSA or to their insurer. If a driver rear-ended a car on a ramp and the car got towed, that goes in the register. Full stop.

The register has to include the date, location, driver, vehicle, number of injuries, number of fatalities, and whether hazmat was involved. It's a paper trail the carrier is legally required to maintain — and it predates any FMCSA data feed by days, weeks, or months.

What's in the register that SAFER doesn't show

The FMCSA crash database has a well-documented processing lag of roughly 60 days. I've written about this before. A crash from five weeks ago often isn't visible on SAFER yet even if it's been reported. If you're vetting a carrier today, the last two months of their crash history are essentially invisible through a standard SAFER pull.

The accident register doesn't have that lag. It's an internal document the carrier's safety department is supposed to update as incidents occur. If a driver had a blowout on a flatbed hauling steel and the tractor got towed last Tuesday, that's supposed to be in the register by now. If it happened to show up on SAFER in six weeks, great — you would have seen it then. But you're tendering the load today.

There's also a coverage gap that doesn't close over time. SAFER's crash data depends on state data feeds, and those feeds have inconsistencies by state, by county, and by the investigative capacity of the responding agency. Some crashes that qualify as FMCSA-reportable never make it into the database because the state data didn't capture them. The carrier's accident register, by contrast, is based on what the carrier's own safety personnel know happened — not on what state data systems reported to federal databases.

These two lists are not identical. For a carrier with any accident history, they're probably not even close.

Why asking matters even when the answer is no

You're not going to get every carrier to hand over their accident register. Most won't, and the larger the fleet, the less likely they are to share internal records with a freight broker. Carriers with legal counsel on retainer get told not to produce anything voluntarily.

That's fine. Ask anyway.

Here's why: the response itself is information.

A carrier who says "absolutely, let me email you that" is operating with confidence in what's in there. A carrier who says "our legal team needs to review that request" is signaling there's something worth reviewing. A carrier who has to ask their dispatcher what an accident register is has a safety management problem regardless of what the document would show — because the safety department doesn't know their own recordkeeping obligations under § 390.15.

I've had carriers tell me "we don't have crashes, so we don't maintain one." That's not how the requirement works. You maintain the register even if it's empty. A carrier who doesn't know that is telling you something about how they run their safety program.

The ask takes about twenty seconds. Add it to your first-tender workflow for any new carrier, and make a note of what you got back. That note becomes part of your vetting record — and that matters now.

The post-Montgomery angle

After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided unanimously by the Supreme Court on May 14, 2026, freight brokers can be sued in state court for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier. The FAAAA preemption defense that covered brokers in the 7th and 11th Circuits is gone nationwide. What "reasonable care" looks like will be defined by juries, and what those juries see is your carrier file.

The conventional file shows: SAFER snapshot, certificate of insurance, operating authority confirmation. Better files show CSA BASIC scores at time of tender. The best files show a documented t-call with specific questions and answers.

Very few files show an accident register request.

That gap is an opportunity. Plaintiff's lawyers are going to make the argument that a reasonably careful broker would have asked for more than what FMCSA publishes. The accident register is a federal record requirement — it's not something you invented; it's something the carrier is legally obligated to keep. Asking for it is defensible. It signals that your vetting wasn't limited to what publicly available tools happen to surface. That's exactly the kind of thing that distinguishes a "reasonable care" file from a minimum-effort one.

A realistic scenario

You're booking a flatbed run — 40,000 lbs of fabricated steel, Pittsburgh to Columbus, $3,400. The carrier is MC-1194052 (DOT-3612847): 16 months of authority, zero crashes on SAFER, Vehicle Maintenance BASIC at 41st percentile, nine power units reported on the most recent MCS-150. Nothing alarming.

What you can't see on SAFER: a tire separation and rollover in February that's still working through the state data pipeline. Tractor got towed. Driver went to the ER. It happened. It just isn't in your SAFER pull yet.

You ask for the accident register. The carrier says "we don't share that with brokers." You make a note: "Requested accident register per 49 CFR § 390.15. Carrier declined." You now have two data points to weigh: a 16-month-old authority (thin inspection sample, BASIC percentiles based on limited data) and a refusal to produce a document they're legally required to maintain. You run the load through a different carrier, or you proceed with eyes open and document your rationale.

If something goes wrong, your file shows you asked. That's not nothing.

What the document actually looks like when they produce it

When a well-run carrier produces their accident register, it's usually a spreadsheet or a table — date, location, driver name (or ID), vehicle unit number, nature of accident, injuries, fatalities, hazmat flag. Some carriers add notes on outcomes: police report number, insurance claim filed, preventability determination. The better ones timestamp when the entry was added.

What you're looking for is patterns: same driver ID appearing multiple times, same type of incident repeating (rear-end, backing, lane change), clusters in time that might correspond to a period when they were running a specific lane or a specific driver hard.

One incident on a register isn't disqualifying. Three of the same type in eighteen months is. And seeing it before it hits SAFER — before the 60-day lag closes — means you're making the decision with current information rather than outdated data.

How I document this

For any first-tender with a new carrier, or any carrier I haven't used in more than six months, I add a line to my vetting record:

If they provide it, I note the date range, the number of entries, and the most recent incident. I scan or photograph it and attach it to the file. If they decline, I note that and include it in my carrier selection rationale — either explaining why I proceeded anyway or why I went with a different carrier.

For loads over $75K in cargo value, or any load involving flatbed steel, machinery, or anything with rollover consequence, this is not optional in my process.

The conversation takes forty-five seconds. The note takes another thirty. The file it creates is the only thing standing between you and a jury deciding what "reasonable care" means.

The bottom line

This regulation has been on the books for decades. Carriers know they're supposed to maintain the register. The fact that almost no broker asks for it isn't because brokers don't care about crashes — it's because the standard vetting workflow was built for a world where SAFER was good enough.

SAFER is not good enough anymore. It was already imperfect on lag and coverage. After Montgomery, "good enough" is a question twelve people in a jury box get to answer, not something you decide at your desk with a SAFER pull open.

Asking for the accident register is one more ask. It takes under a minute. It specifically invokes a federal recordkeeping requirement. The response — whatever it is — goes in your file. And your file is the only defense you've got.

Most brokers won't do this. That's the point.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com