The Question About the Clearinghouse You're Not Asking Your Carriers

Sixteen months ago, a carrier out of Memphis — MC-1249037, DOT-3564821, authority granted twenty-two months prior — moved a refrigerated load for a broker I know. Clean SAFER snapshot. No inspections that set off alarms. Insurance in order. Carrier booked, dispatched a driver, load moved. Fourteen miles from the receiver, the truck rear-ended a passenger car at 65 mph. The driver was prohibited. Clearinghouse prohibited — meaning he'd tested positive for amphetamines seven months earlier, never completed the return-to-duty protocol required under 49 CFR Part 382, and was legally barred from operating a commercial motor vehicle. The carrier knew, or should have known, because federal law required them to run an annual Clearinghouse query on every CDL driver they employed. They hadn't run one in over a year. And nobody in that tender chain ever asked about the carrier's drug and alcohol compliance program.

That broker — who did nothing wrong in the conventional sense; ran the MC, checked the bond, pulled the ACORD — is now a named defendant. Negligent selection. After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC (May 14, 2026), that lawsuit stays in state court. Federal preemption is gone.

The FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse has been live since January 2020. Most brokers I talk to have still never thought to work it into their carrier vetting. Not because they're careless. Because nobody told them it was a broker issue. It is.

What the Clearinghouse Is

The Clearinghouse is a national database, administered by FMCSA, that tracks CDL driver drug and alcohol violations — positive tests, test refusals, and other violations under 49 CFR Part 382. It also tracks where a driver is in the Return to Duty process: whether they've completed a Substance Abuse Professional (SAP) evaluation, followed through on treatment, and passed a follow-up test.

The whole point was to close a specific gap. Before 2020, a driver who tested positive at one carrier could get terminated, walk across the street to a different carrier, and get behind the wheel the next week. The new employer might run a reference check — "would you rehire?"— but no one was required to report or share the positive test result across company lines. Carriers couldn't see it. Drivers knew it. The Clearinghouse changed that.

What it didn't change: brokers don't have direct access. You can't query individual drivers. Only employers, law enforcement, and state licensing agencies can run full queries. That doesn't make this irrelevant to your vetting process. It just changes what you're looking for and where.

What Carriers Are Required to Do

This is the part that matters for your file.

Under 49 CFR § 382.701 and 49 CFR § 382.711, every motor carrier that employs CDL drivers must register with the Clearinghouse. No registration option. It's mandatory.

Once registered, carriers must run a full Clearinghouse query before any CDL driver's first dispatch. That query requires the driver's consent and shows actual violation history. 49 CFR § 382.715 governs this. If the pre-employment query shows a "prohibited" status, that driver cannot operate. No exceptions.

After hire, carriers must run at least a limited query on every current CDL driver once a year. 49 CFR § 382.717. A limited query doesn't show details, but it tells the carrier whether a full query is required — i.e., whether violations exist in the driver's record. If the limited query returns a hit, the carrier has 24 hours to run a full query with the driver's consent before that driver can continue to operate.

Then there's 49 CFR § 382.211. Under this section, a driver with a "prohibited" status in the Clearinghouse cannot operate a commercial motor vehicle. Period. No nuance. A carrier that dispatches a prohibited driver has violated federal law — not a regulatory gray area, a clear violation. The driver can't clear the prohibition by simply switching carriers or letting time pass. They have to complete the full RTD process: SAP evaluation, recommended treatment or education, a return-to-duty test, and a follow-up testing schedule over at least twelve months. The Clearinghouse tracks every step of that progression. Carriers are supposed to be monitoring it.

Where this breaks down in practice: carriers in months 10 through 20 of authority — scrambling to fill driver seats, running on thin margins, sometimes without a dedicated safety officer — often run the pre-employment query and then don't touch the Clearinghouse again for two years. They assume "no news is good news." That assumption fails the moment a driver picks up a violation at a prior employer that got entered into the Clearinghouse, because nobody queried it.

What You Can See as a Broker

Two places.

The first is FMCSA's Safety Measurement System — specifically the Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC. This tracks violations found during roadside inspections: a driver caught under the influence at a weigh station, a driver who refuses a test, a carrier with documented enforcement actions. Not every Clearinghouse violation shows here. But any violation that got flagged in a federal roadside inspection does. A carrier above the 65th percentile in Controlled Substances/Alcohol is a conversation at minimum. Above 80th, you need a documented reason in your file for why the load still moved.

The second is the SAFER company snapshot — specifically the inspection history. Look at driver out-of-service rates and whether there are any D&A-related violations in the data. Not the full picture, but it tells you something about how this carrier's drivers behave when a federal inspector is watching.

What you cannot see: whether the carrier is registered with the Clearinghouse, whether they're running annual queries, whether specific drivers on their payroll are currently prohibited. That data is not public. Which is exactly why asking matters.

The Question You Should Be Asking

"Are you registered with the FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, and do you run pre-employment and annual queries on all your CDL drivers?"

That's it. Two parts. Any carrier running a compliant program can answer this in about fifteen seconds. They'll tell you yes, probably mention who handles their queries — a third-party consortium, an in-house safety manager — and how often they run the annual pass. The answer is not complicated if they're actually doing it.

A carrier that stumbles on this, or answers "what's the Clearinghouse?" — that answer goes in your file too. With the date and the name of who you spoke with. Because if you tender a load, that carrier's driver causes a crash, and it turns out the driver was prohibited, your discovery file is going to show whether you ever asked about the carrier's D&A compliance. If you never asked, you're defending a gap. If you asked and they misrepresented their program, you have a much better defense.

I'm not saying you can't haul with a carrier whose compliance program has rough edges. That's a business decision. But the decision should be documented.

Why This Grew Teeth After Montgomery

Before Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, this was a theoretical risk in most jurisdictions. The 7th and 11th Circuits had been holding for years that FMCSA regulations preempted state-law negligent selection claims against brokers. A carrier-file gap that might have been embarrassing in deposition rarely made it to a jury verdict. That protection is gone.

A unanimous Supreme Court said the FAAAA does not preempt those claims. State courts can hear them. And state courts — especially plaintiff-friendly venues — don't need a legal theory so much as a narrative. A prohibited driver. A carrier that hadn't run an annual Clearinghouse query in fourteen months. A broker who could produce an insurance cert and an MC number but nothing about the carrier's D&A program. That narrative fits in an opening statement.

The legal standard isn't whether you ran the MC number. It's whether you exercised reasonable care in selecting this carrier to haul your shipper's freight. A reasonable care argument in 2026 has to grapple with the fact that there's a federally mandated database specifically designed to keep prohibited drivers off the road, that carriers are legally required to use it, and that you never once asked whether the carrier you selected was using it.

The question costs you nothing. Skipping it costs considerably more.

The Controlled Substances BASIC as Your First Screen

Before you call, look. If a carrier's Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC is above the intervention threshold, you're already behind on the conversation. That percentile is built from roadside inspections where federal officers found and documented violations. A carrier with a high percentile here has drivers who have been caught — repeatedly, at scale — with D&A problems in federal inspection events. That's not a statistical artifact. That's a pattern.

A high BASIC percentile doesn't tell you what's in the Clearinghouse. But a carrier whose drivers keep getting flagged in roadside inspections for D&A issues is not running tight Clearinghouse compliance. The two tend to cluster. You can check this in two minutes before you ever pick up the phone.

If the Controlled Substances BASIC is clean, you still ask. Clean BASIC means no violations showed up in inspections. It doesn't mean there are no violations. Clearinghouse entries that never surfaced at a weigh station — a positive test from a prior employer, a self-referral during employment — won't appear in SAFER data. The two data layers are separate.

How I Document This

For every carrier I vet, I'm logging:

• Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC percentile at the time of tender, with the SMS query date and the numeric value
• Direct question to the carrier contact about Clearinghouse registration and query practices — the name of who I spoke with, the date, and their answer verbatim if they give me specifics
• Any D&A-related violations in the SAFER inspection history
• Whether any follow-up was needed based on the answer, and what I did with it

If a carrier's Controlled Substances BASIC crosses a threshold after tender — on a multi-stop run, a drop trailer arrangement, anything where the load is still moving — continuous monitoring catches it. That alert becomes part of the file too, with the date and what I did next: held the load, requested documentation, escalated to the shipper.

DOTScreener's carrier onboarding packet asks carriers to attest to their Clearinghouse compliance as part of verification. When a carrier has gone through that process, it's in their file. For carriers who haven't, the vetting call is where you close the gap and create the record.

One question. Write it down. Keep the file. That's the whole protocol.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com