The 7 Red Flags Every Shipper Should Check Before Hiring a Trucking Company

Most carrier vetting fails in one of two ways. Either nobody checks anything — the carrier has authority and a truck, the rate is right, the load moves — or somebody "checks" by glancing at the MC number and calling it diligence. Neither survives contact with a plaintiff's lawyer after a bad crash, and neither actually protects your freight or your reputation in the meantime.

The good news: the data you need is almost entirely free and public. FMCSA publishes it, and a shipper or broker who knows what to look at can build a genuinely defensible picture of a carrier in about ten minutes. Here are the seven red flags I check on every carrier, what each one means, and where to find it.

Treat this as a checklist. The point isn't that any single flag disqualifies a carrier — plenty of good carriers have one blemish. The point is the *pattern*, and the *record that you looked.*

1. Authority age — how long have they actually been operating?

Where: FMCSA SAFER Company Snapshot / L&I (Licensing & Insurance) — look at the "MCS-150 / authority granted" date.

A motor carrier's operating authority has a birthday. A carrier whose authority was granted six weeks ago is not necessarily bad — everyone starts somewhere — but it is necessarily *unproven*, and it correlates with elevated risk. Newer authorities have thinner safety records, which means less data to judge them by, and they're statistically over-represented in early-failure and chameleon-carrier patterns.

The flag isn't "new = no." The flag is **"new authority + something else."** New authority plus an address that matches a recently-shut-down carrier. New authority plus a rate well below market. New authority plus a fleet size that doesn't match the loads they're bidding on. Authority age is the context that makes the other six flags meaningful.

A practical line I use: under 18 months of authority, I look harder at everything else. There's industry data tying the first 12–18 months of operation to elevated crash involvement, so a young authority isn't a disqualifier — it's a reason to slow down.

2. Out-of-service (OOS) rates — vehicles AND drivers

Where: SAFER Company Snapshot shows the carrier's vehicle and driver out-of-service percentages alongside the national averages.

When a roadside inspection finds a violation serious enough that the truck or driver can't continue, that's an out-of-service order. The OOS *rate* is the share of a carrier's inspections that ended that way. SAFER conveniently prints the national average right next to the carrier's number, so you don't have to memorize anything.

• Vehicle OOS national average sits around 20%. A carrier running noticeably above that has a maintenance problem.
• Driver OOS national average is far lower — in the mid-single digits. A carrier well above it has a *people* problem: hours-of-service violations, licensing issues, medical-card lapses.

One caution that matters: read the OOS rate alongside the **inspection count**. A carrier with a 50% vehicle OOS rate on 2 inspections is statistical noise. A 35% rate on 120 inspections is a flashing red light. The denominator is the context. (I wrote a whole separate piece on why the inspection count is the most-ignored number on the snapshot.)

3. Insurance gaps — and the cancellation date nobody checks

Where: FMCSA L&I — active insurance filings (Form 91X for liability), effective dates, and any cancellation-pending dates.

Every authorized carrier must keep liability insurance on file with FMCSA. The filing is public. Two things to verify:

• Is coverage active right now, and at adequate limits for your freight? The federal minimum for general freight is $750,000, but a single catastrophic-injury crash blows through that in an afternoon. Many shippers require $1M and confirm cargo coverage separately.
• Is there a cancellation date pending? This is the check almost nobody does. When an insurer files notice to cancel, L&I shows a cancellation effective date *before* the policy actually lapses. A carrier mid-cancellation is a carrier about to be operating illegally — and a carrier whose insurance churns repeatedly (filing, cancellation, new filing, repeat) is telling you something about its financial stability.

Insurance isn't just a box to check at onboarding. It's a status that changes, and the gap between "had insurance when we onboarded them" and "had insurance the day they hauled this load" is exactly the gap a plaintiff's lawyer pries open.

4. Recent crashes — count, severity, and recency

Where: SAFER Company Snapshot crash summary (fatal / injury / tow-away counts, 24-month window).

FMCSA reports a rolling count of a carrier's reportable crashes. The raw count needs context — a 200-truck fleet will naturally log more crashes than a two-truck operation — so read it against fleet size. But pay special attention to:

• Fatal and injury crashes, not just tow-aways. Severity matters more than volume.
• Recency and clustering. Three crashes in the last four months is a different signal than three spread across two years.

Crash history is backward-looking and imperfect — FMCSA's own crash data doesn't yet fully account for preventability in the public snapshot — but a carrier with a cluster of recent severe crashes is exactly the carrier a plaintiff will say you "should have known" about.

5. BASIC alerts — the CSA percentiles in Alert status

Where: FMCSA Safety Measurement System (SMS), the seven BASIC categories.

The Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program scores carriers in seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs): Unsafe Driving, Hours-of-Service Compliance, Driver Fitness, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Vehicle Maintenance, Hazardous Materials Compliance, and Crash Indicator. Each is expressed as a **percentile** — how the carrier ranks against its peers.

When a carrier crosses FMCSA's intervention threshold in a category, the system flags it with an **Alert** symbol. The thresholds vary by BASIC (generally 65% for general carriers in the safety-critical categories, lower for HOS and Unsafe Driving). An Alert means the carrier is in the worst slice of its peer group on a safety behavior that has been *statistically associated with crash risk.*

This is the single most quoted data in negligent-selection litigation. When a plaintiff's lawyer wants to show a carrier was "obviously" dangerous, they put the carrier's Alert-status BASICs on a slide and ask the jury whether anyone bothered to look. A carrier in Alert on Unsafe Driving or HOS the day you tendered, with no record that anyone reviewed it, is the case.

6. Cargo insurance issues — the coverage that protects *your* freight

Where: Certificate of insurance from the carrier; cargo coverage is often *not* on file with FMCSA the way liability is.

Liability insurance protects the public after a crash. **Cargo insurance** protects your freight if it's damaged, lost, or stolen — and it's a separate policy that FMCSA does not require to be filed publicly. This is a gap shippers fall into constantly: they confirm the carrier has FMCSA-filed liability and assume the freight is covered too. It may not be.

Things to verify on the cargo side:

• A current **cargo policy with adequate limits** for the value of your loads (a carrier with $100K cargo coverage hauling a $400K load is a problem you'll discover at the worst possible moment).
• Exclusions — many cargo policies exclude specific commodities (electronics, pharmaceuticals, temperature-controlled, theft-prone goods). A clean certificate with a fatal exclusion buried in it is worse than no certificate.
• That the certificate is **current and the carrier named matches** the carrier you're tendering to — a mismatch is a classic double-brokering tell, which brings us to the last flag.

7. Double-brokering indicators — is the carrier even the carrier?

Where: Cross-reference the booking carrier against the carrier on the BOL, the insurance certificate, and FMCSA records; watch for newly-changed contact info and authority/asset mismatches.

Double brokering — where a carrier you booked secretly re-brokers your load to a different, unvetted carrier — is both a fraud problem and a liability problem. If the truck that crashes isn't the carrier you screened, your entire vetting record points at the wrong company. You documented diligence on Carrier A; Carrier B, whom you never saw, was actually on the road.

Warning signs:

• Authority/asset mismatch: a carrier with one truck on its MCS-150 bidding on dozens of loads.
• Recently changed phone, email, or dispatch info that doesn't match FMCSA records.
• Insurance certificate name that doesn't match the booking entity.
• A rate that's too good — fraudsters underbid to win the load, then re-broker it.
• Reluctance to provide truck/trailer numbers, driver name, or real-time location.

The defense is the same as the cure: verify that the entity you screened is the entity hauling the load, and keep the record that you did.

The eighth thing, which isn't a flag — it's the record

Check all seven of these on every carrier and you will catch the overwhelming majority of dangerous carriers before they touch your freight. But catching them is only half the value. The other half is **proving you checked.**

A verbal "yeah, we vet our carriers" is worth nothing in a courtroom and not much in a vendor audit either. A timestamped record — these seven data points, captured as they existed on the day you screened, with the carrier's own attestations attached — is worth everything. It's the difference between a story and evidence.

That's what I built DOTScreener to do: run these checks automatically against live FMCSA data, flag the red flags, capture the carrier's attestations, and freeze the whole thing into a dated, defensible report. Same checks a careful broker would do by hand — minus the ten minutes, plus a record that survives three years and a deposition.

Run the seven checks. Keep the eighth.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com

---

Sources

• [FMCSA SAFER Company Snapshot](https://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/CompanySnapshot.aspx) — authority, OOS rates, crash summary
• [FMCSA Licensing & Insurance (L&I)](https://li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov/LIVIEW/pkg_menu.prc_menu) — authority status, insurance filings, cancellation dates
• [FMCSA Safety Measurement System (CSA BASICs)](https://csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/) — BASIC percentiles and intervention thresholds
• [FMCSA — Insurance Filing Requirements (49 CFR Part 387)](https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/registration/insurance-filing-requirements) — minimum liability limits
• [FMCSA — Protect Your Move / double-brokering and fraud guidance](https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/protect-your-move/double-brokering)