You Vetted the Carrier. Did Anyone Vet the Broker?

Here's a question most shippers can't answer about the broker they've used for three years: what's the status of their BMC-84 surety bond, and has it ever been the subject of a claim?

You know the carrier is the one with the truck. So when you think about vetting, you think about the carrier — authority, insurance, safety scores. Fair enough. But if you tender to a broker and the broker picks the carrier, then the broker is making the carrier-selection decision that lands on your verdict sheet after a bad crash. And almost no shipper vets the broker with anything close to the rigor they'd apply to a carrier.

After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II — the Supreme Court's unanimous May 2026 decision holding that the FAAAA does not preempt state-law negligent-selection claims against brokers — that gap got expensive. The case was about suing brokers. But read the plaintiff's playbook and you'll see the shipper sitting right next to the broker at the defense table, because the shipper is the one who chose the broker who chose the carrier who crashed.

Why the broker is now part of your exposure

A shipper's negligent-selection theory used to feel abstract. You don't own the truck, you don't employ the driver, and if a broker sat between you and the carrier, you could tell yourself the broker owned the vetting.

Montgomery changed the temperature on that whole chain. Negligent selection is now a live, non-preempted claim against brokers in state court, which means brokers are getting sued, which means brokers are getting deposed, which means their carrier-selection files — and the shipper relationships behind them — are getting subpoenaed. When a plaintiff's attorney reconstructs "who put this carrier on the road," the answer is often: the shipper hired a broker, and the broker hired the carrier. Two selection decisions. Two chances to be found negligent.

So the shipper's due-diligence question isn't just "is this carrier safe?" It's also "did I hand my freight to a broker who actually vets, or to a broker who forwards load-board rates and hopes?"

What "vet the broker" actually means

Vetting a broker is not vetting a carrier with the word "broker" swapped in. A broker's federal footprint is different, and three pieces matter.

Active broker authority. A broker operates under property-broker authority (an MC number), and that authority can be active, pending, revoked, or under a reinstatement. A broker whose authority lapsed — even briefly — and kept arranging loads was operating illegally, and that's the kind of fact a plaintiff loves to put in front of a jury. Pull the authority and confirm it's active as of the tender, not "was active whenever we onboarded them in 2023."

The BMC-84 surety bond. Every property broker must maintain a $75,000 financial security filing under 49 U.S.C. § 13906 — almost always a BMC-84 surety bond (a few use a BMC-85 trust). That bond isn't liability insurance and it won't cover a wreck. But its status is a tell. A bond that's been cancelled, is pending cancellation, or has had claims filed against it says something about the broker's financial health and how they treat the carriers they hire. A broker who stiffs carriers on payment is a broker carriers won't run for twice — which pushes them toward the desperate, the new-authority, the chameleon. Bond trouble upstream shows up as carrier-quality trouble downstream.

Contingent cargo and contingent liability coverage. This is the coverage a lot of shippers assume exists and never verify. A broker's contingent cargo policy responds only when the carrier's primary cargo coverage fails to — and it's frequently thin, full of exclusions, or absent entirely. If you're moving a $1M cargo load on a high-value lane and the broker's contingent cargo caps at $100K, you should know that before the freight moves, not during a claim.

A quick scenario

Say you're a shipper moving 18 loads a week through a broker — call them MC-1288740, property-broker authority, four years old. Good service, competitive rates, never a problem. One of their carriers is in a fatal crash. The demand comes in at $4 million.

Discovery starts. It turns out the broker's authority was clean, but their BMC-84 bond had two claims filed against it in the prior year from carriers who weren't paid, and their contingent cargo policy had lapsed for a 60-day stretch that happened to include the month they booked the carrier that crashed. None of that caused the wreck. All of it becomes a story: this shipper routed millions in freight through a broker showing clear signs of financial distress and never once checked. Your defense is now explaining why you didn't look, which is a much worse position than showing what you found when you did.

The regulation that anchors the broker's obligations here is Part 371 — broker recordkeeping and conduct — and the financial-responsibility requirement at 49 U.S.C. § 13906. At tender time, the plain-English version is: a legitimate broker has active authority, a bond in good standing, and coverage that's actually in force. Confirming those three isn't paranoia. It's the difference between a documented decision and a blind one.

How DOTScreener screens a broker

This is exactly why we built broker screening into DOTScreener as a first-class result, not an afterthought. Drop a broker's MC number into DOTScreener and you don't get a "this is a broker, not a carrier" error. You get broker-shaped results: the active authority status, the BMC-84 surety bond (or BMC-85 trust) with its filing status, and the contingent cargo and contingent liability certificates on file. The paper a shipper needs to answer "is this a real, financially sound broker" is on one screen.

And because some entities hold both carrier and broker authority — a fleet that also brokers its overflow freight — DOTScreener now screens those dual-authority entities as what they actually are. You get the complete carrier record (safety and compliance, fleet intelligence, the Operations Map, roadside-inspection history) and a dual-authority banner surfacing the broker-side surety bond and contingent coverages, with a reminder to confirm they'll haul the load themselves rather than re-broker it. That last point matters: an entity that takes your load under its carrier authority and quietly re-brokers it has turned one selection decision into two, and you didn't get to vet the second one.

The point of putting all of this on a single screen isn't convenience for its own sake. It's that a decision you can see is a decision you can document — and after Montgomery, the documented decision is the one that survives.

How I document this

When I vet a broker — and I vet every broker I route freight through — the file gets three lines, dated:

Broker authority (MC-XXXXXXX) confirmed active as of [date]. BMC-84 surety bond status: [in good standing / claims noted / pending cancellation]. Contingent cargo: [carrier / limit / in force through date], contingent liability: [carrier / limit].

If anything's off — a bond claim, a coverage gap, an authority that reinstated after a lapse — I note what I found and what I decided to do about it. Sometimes the answer is "proceeded anyway, here's why": a single old bond claim on an otherwise-solid broker isn't disqualifying. But the why is written down. That's the whole game. A shipper who can produce a dated broker-vetting note is telling a completely different story in deposition than a shipper who says "they came recommended."

Vet the carrier. Of course. But the broker made a selection decision on your behalf, and Montgomery just made that decision something a jury gets to examine. Screen the broker too. It takes one MC number and about a minute.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com