The FMCSA Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse: What It Tells You and Why You Still Can't Pull It

A cocaine positive in 2022. A return-to-duty process that ran through most of 2023. An annual Clearinghouse query in January 2024 showing "violation — resolved." A carrier that looked at that result, saw the SAP program was complete, and kept the driver on the road.

That November, the driver T-boned a pickup truck at a Missouri intersection. Two people hospitalized. Plaintiff attorney had the full picture in four hours of discovery. The carrier had done everything technically required under 49 CFR Part 382. The broker had no documentation showing they'd ever asked the carrier a single question about their drug testing program. Settlement came in at $1.9 million.

The carrier in question was running 11 power units under MC-1247893 / DOT-3587402. Nothing exotic about them. Dry van, general freight, two years of authority. They were on a lot of approved carrier lists that never got updated.

I'm not going to relitigate whether the driver should have been driving. The SAP program was complete, the RTD test was clean, the carrier followed the reg. The problem was that "resolved" doesn't mean what most brokers assume — and the broker had never asked enough to find out.

What the Clearinghouse Is and Who Uses It

FMCSA's Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse launched January 6, 2020. It's a federal database that tracks CDL violations under Part 382: positive drug or alcohol tests, refusals to test, employer-reported violations, and return-to-duty status. The purpose was simple. Before the Clearinghouse, a driver who failed a pre-employment drug test at one carrier could walk out, drive to the next carrier down the road, and get hired the same afternoon. Nobody talked to each other.

Under 49 CFR § 382.701, motor carriers are required to:

• Query the Clearinghouse before a new CDL driver operates any commercial motor vehicle for them (the pre-employment query)
• Run annual queries on every CDL driver currently in their employ
• Report all Part 382 violations — positives, refusals, RTD completions — within required timeframes

If a driver has an unresolved violation in the Clearinghouse, they're prohibited from operating. The carrier can't put them behind the wheel and claim they didn't know.

That's the system. Here's the part that surprises most brokers I talk to.

You Can't Pull It

Freight brokers are not registered employers under the Clearinghouse. You don't have query access, and there's no workaround. The system is restricted to motor carriers acting as employers, medical review officers, substance abuse professionals, and C/TPAs operating on behalf of carriers. FMCSA made a deliberate choice to keep brokers out. You don't have an employment relationship with the driver, so you don't get the driver's record.

You can't pay a third party to run Clearinghouse queries on drivers who don't work for you. You can't request them through a C/TPA as though you're the employer. Brokers who say they "run Clearinghouse checks" either mean something entirely different or are confused about how the system works.

This matters because a lot of broker carrier-qualification checklists have a checkbox that says something like "drug program verified." That checkbox can mean almost anything, and plaintiff attorneys know it.

What "Resolved" Actually Means

Back to the Missouri case. The driver had a cocaine positive in 2022. Under 49 CFR § 382.605, after a Part 382 violation a driver must:

1. Be immediately removed from safety-sensitive functions — no driving, no operating

2. Be evaluated by a Substance Abuse Professional (SAP)

3. Complete treatment or education as the SAP prescribes

4. Pass a return-to-duty drug test with a negative result

5. Comply with a follow-up testing plan — at minimum six unannounced tests in the 12 months after RTD, with the SAP setting the longer-term schedule

When all of that's done, the Clearinghouse reflects the violation as "resolved." The driver is legally clear to operate again.

Resolved does not mean drug-free. It means compliance was completed. The follow-up testing plan is designed to catch ongoing use, but six tests over 12 months leaves a lot of uncovered days. The SAP's job is compliance evaluation, not addiction treatment. A driver can finish the RTD process and still have a substance problem. The system didn't promise otherwise.

The carrier in the Missouri case saw "resolved" and a clean 2023 drug screen and concluded the driver was good to go. By the letter of Part 382, that conclusion was defensible. Under the negligent-hiring standard a jury applies to a motor carrier — and, post-Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the negligent-selection standard being applied to brokers — the question is whether the carrier (and the broker tendering the load) made a reasonable decision with everything they had available. That's a fact question. Juries decide fact questions.

What Brokers Can Actually Do

You can't query the Clearinghouse. You can do a few other things that build an actual record.

Ask about the C/TPA. Under Part 382, carriers with interstate CDL drivers must have a drug and alcohol testing program. Small carriers almost always use a consortium/third-party administrator. Ask which one. A carrier that can name their C/TPA and tell you how often they run random tests is a different conversation from one that stares at you blankly. Document the answer either way.

Ask about the pre-employment query practice. The reg requires carriers to query before a driver touches a CMV. This is a yes-or-no question: do you query the Clearinghouse before putting a new driver on the road? If they confirm it, write that down with the date. If they can't answer it, write that down too.

Pull the Controlled Substances BASIC. This is the one number brokers consistently ignore that they shouldn't. The Controlled Substances BASIC on SAFER is built from inspection findings — positive tests caught at roadside or post-accident, observed violations, refusals caught during a Level I or II inspection, driver recall violations. It's not a proxy for the Clearinghouse. It's a separate, fleet-level signal that shows up when a carrier has a pattern.

A carrier at the 75th percentile in Controlled Substances didn't get there with one bad hire. That number reflects a systemic pattern in how they manage their drivers and their testing program. If you're tendering freight to a carrier sitting at the 80th percentile on Controlled Substances and your file doesn't explain why, you have a problem.

Owner-operators on lease — verify the coverage. Under 49 CFR § 376.12(l), the written lease between a carrier and an owner-operator must address driver compliance with federal safety requirements, including Part 382. Small carriers using leased owner-ops sometimes let those drivers fall outside the testing program entirely, especially if they're using an owner-op's own DOT authority on a dual-authority arrangement. If the carrier is running leased equipment, ask who covers those drivers under the testing program. The answer tells you a lot.

The Controlled Substances BASIC Is Your Practical Tool

Everything above has limits. The BASIC is the one data point you can check consistently, compare over time, and document in a carrier file that will hold up.

Anything above the 65th percentile in Controlled Substances should prompt a documented conversation. What's causing the flag? Is it post-accident tests, pre-employment failures, roadside positives? Do they know what the violations were? A carrier with a 70th percentile BASIC that can't explain the violations has a management problem. A carrier at the 72nd percentile who tells you "we had three drivers fail pre-employment screens in 2023 before we changed our screening protocols and our numbers have been clean since" is giving you something you can evaluate.

Write both answers down. The explanation you get matters less than the record showing you asked.

If you're using DOTScreener's Continuous Monitoring, you'll get flagged when a carrier's Controlled Substances BASIC moves into alert range — not just when you first approve them. That's where most brokers get caught: the carrier was clean at qualification a year ago, the BASIC crept up in the meantime, and nobody re-checked before the next load tender. Monitoring closes that window.

The PSP Pull Is the Carrier's Job, But Ask About It

The Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP) report is the driver-level equivalent of what the BASIC shows at fleet scale — five years of crash history and three years of inspection history pulled directly from the MCMIS database. Carriers can order PSP reports before hiring. They're required to notify the driver that they did.

You can't order a PSP on a driver who doesn't work for you. But you can ask whether the carrier orders PSP as part of their hiring process. A carrier that routinely pulls PSP on new drivers is taking an extra step the reg doesn't require but that any plaintiff attorney will find impressive. One that's never heard of PSP isn't a carrier I'm comfortable with on a high-value load.

How I Document This

Every carrier file should have a Drug & Alcohol section. Here's what goes in mine:

• C/TPA name and date of conversation (or "not provided — carrier states self-administered program, no specifics given")
• Whether the carrier confirmed pre-employment Clearinghouse query practice — the exact question I asked and what they said
• Controlled Substances BASIC percentile at the time of approval, timestamped, pulled from SAFER or DOTScreener
• If the BASIC is above the 65th percentile: a note on whether I asked follow-up questions, what the answers were, and my decision rationale
• Whether the carrier mentioned PSP as part of their hiring process

That last part — the decision rationale when a flag is present — is the one that matters most in discovery. Not whether you checked. What you did after you saw something.

A file that shows "Controlled Substances BASIC: 71st percentile — no follow-up questions asked, load tendered" is worse than no documentation at all. The record says you saw it and kept going without asking. A file that shows "71st percentile, spoke with carrier dispatch on [date], three violations traced to previous management team under prior DOT, no violations in 14 months under current ownership, decision to proceed documented" gives a jury something to work with.

The Clearinghouse is a better system than anything that existed before 2020. But brokers sit outside it. You work with the BASIC, you ask the carrier the right questions, and you build a file that shows you took the issue seriously — not just that you had a checkbox.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com