You Approved Them Two Years Ago. Have You Looked Since?

The Question That Ended the Deposition Early

A broker I know — small operation, three dispatchers, roughly 200 active carriers on the list — got deposed after one of his carriers hit a cyclist on FM 1960 outside of Houston. One fatality. The kind of case that generates a demand letter with an eight-figure number at the top.

His carrier file was actually decent for initial approval. SAFER printout, BMC-91 filing confirmation, signed carrier agreement, a copy of the ACORD 25 showing $1,000,000 in primary liability. He'd done real work at the qualification stage. Three years earlier.

The plaintiff's attorney asked him three questions about that carrier. The first two he answered fine. The third one was: "From the date you approved them in July 2023 to the date of this accident in April 2026, how many times did you verify that their safety metrics had not materially worsened?"

The answer was zero.

The follow-up: "And during that same period you tendered them seventy-eight loads, correct?"

There is no good answer to those two questions together.

What a Carrier File Is Actually Recording

When you set up a new carrier, you're taking a snapshot. SAFER as of that date. Insurance as of that date. Safety rating as of that date. You're answering one question: is this carrier currently safe and currently compliant? That's not a bad question. It's just the wrong time horizon.

The problem is that carrier approval programs are almost universally built around the intake step. Qualification, onboarding, initial vetting — call it what you want. That's the part with the checklist, the required documents, the approve/deny decision. Most carrier management systems have an "approved" flag that gets set and stays set until someone manually turns it off. Nobody defines what would turn it off.

A carrier's Unsafe Driving BASIC can go from 35th percentile to 85th percentile over eighteen months without triggering a single notification unless you've specifically set that up. Their OOS rate can triple. Their safety rating can change from Satisfactory to Conditional. They can lapse on cargo coverage for six weeks and reinstate it before you notice. None of that touches the "approved" flag.

When you tender load number forty to a carrier you approved two years ago, you're implicitly making a second selection decision. You're deciding this carrier is still appropriate for this freight. You just aren't documenting that decision, because in your system it doesn't register as a decision at all.

Post-Montgomery, that gap is worth closing.

The Federal Rules Don't Require Re-Vetting. That's Not a Defense.

I've heard this from brokers who've thought about it: "There's no reg that says I have to re-check SAFER every year. Show me where it's written."

They're right. There's no explicit re-vetting schedule for brokers in the FMCSRs. 49 CFR § 387.9 sets minimum financial responsibility requirements for motor carriers — $750,000 in primary liability for general freight, $1,000,000 for certain hazmat categories — but it doesn't impose a re-verification interval on the brokers who hire them. The FMCSRs generally regulate carriers, not the freight brokers tendering loads to them.

That's exactly the wrong framework post-Montgomery.

The Supreme Court's ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II didn't create new regulations. It removed a legal shield. It held, unanimously, that the FAAAA does not preempt state tort law negligence claims against freight brokers. State tort law. Which means the standard of care is: what would a reasonably careful broker have done?

A plaintiff's expert witness doesn't need a regulation requiring annual re-vetting. They need to testify that a reasonably careful broker would have checked whether the carrier's safety profile had changed materially before giving them load number forty-two. That's an easy opinion to give, and it won't be hard to find an expert who will give it.

The absence of a rule isn't protection. In a negligence case, you're being measured against a reasonable standard of conduct, not a regulatory checklist. Those are different things, and the difference matters now in a way it didn't before May 14, 2026.

What Actually Changes Over Time

BASIC scores update monthly. FMCSA refreshes the SMS database on a rolling basis as inspection data flows in. A carrier with a clean profile in January can have an Unsafe Driving BASIC in alert territory by September if they've had a bad inspection run. Visible and verifiable — but only if you're looking.

OOS rates shift. A 3% vehicle OOS rate on initial approval looks completely different from a 21% rate fourteen months later. That move tells you something is happening in their maintenance program or their compliance culture. You'd want to know about it before you put freight on their truck.

Safety ratings change. Not often, but they do. A compliance review can move a carrier from Satisfactory to Conditional. A Conditional rating means FMCSA has identified serious safety deficiencies. Under 49 CFR Part 385, a motor carrier with a Conditional rating is on notice that it has safety problems requiring corrective action. That's not something you want to find out in discovery.

Insurance status changes constantly. Policies lapse, get cancelled, get reinstated. The FMCSA L&I database tracks filing history. A carrier can show active insurance on the date you approved them and have a 60-day lapse window somewhere in the subsequent two years. If an accident happened in that window, the coverage picture gets complicated fast — and your carrier file showing a two-year-old ACORD 25 isn't going to help you.

Any one of these shifts can happen quietly. Your initial approval catches none of it retroactively.

The Four Triggers That Should Prompt a Re-Look

I'm not telling you to re-vet every carrier every month. That's not realistic for a brokerage doing volume. But these four events should automatically push you back to the SAFER screen before the next load:

A BASIC score crossing your alert threshold. If your written policy says you don't use carriers above a certain percentile on Unsafe Driving or Crash Indicator — and it should — then you need a way to find out when an approved carrier crosses that line. That requires monitoring, not just a one-time check at approval.

An insurance lapse in L&I history. Any cancellation or lapse in the carrier's filing history should prompt a same-day review. Not "we'll ask them next time we talk." An active-insurance-confirmed-today review. The L&I database shows filing gaps. Check it.

A safety rating change. If you approved a carrier when they were Satisfactory or Not Rated, and they've since moved to Conditional, that approval was based on a profile that no longer exists. Your file doesn't automatically reflect that change.

A long gap followed by a new load request. If a carrier goes dark in your system for six months or more and then comes back with a tender, treat them like a new carrier. Re-run the full check. A lot can change in six months. The fact that you once approved them doesn't obligate you to skip the diligence you'd do on anyone else.

None of these are complicated. They require either a monitoring tool that flags status changes or a periodic review cadence — ideally both. Neither is expensive. Neither requires outside counsel.

How I Document This

When I re-verify a carrier, I log it the same way I log initial approval: a timestamp and a summary of what I found.

The log entry includes the date of re-check, which sources I pulled (SAFER, FMCSA L&I, internal BASIC review), the current status on key metrics — safety rating, Unsafe Driving BASIC percentile, vehicle OOS rate, active insurance confirmed in L&I — and whether anything changed materially since the prior check.

If I find a BASIC in alert territory, I note what I decided: carrier on hold, explanation requested, or (rarely) continue with a documented reason why the violations don't reflect an operational pattern. That last option requires written justification. I don't just wave it through.

If I find an insurance lapse in the L&I history, I note the dates, call the carrier, and document what they told me. I want to know what caused it and whether it's genuinely resolved.

The point is that when I assign load forty-two to a carrier, there's a record showing that at some reasonable point before that load — within the last quarter, within the last six months depending on volume — I looked at their current profile and they were still clean. That's what it means to treat every subsequent load as a selection decision.

It doesn't have to be elaborate. A timestamped entry in your TMS that reads: "Re-verified MC-1247893 on 2026-07-01: SAFER Satisfactory, Unsafe Driving 34th percentile, vehicle OOS rate 4.1%, L&I active, no lapse in prior 12 months — approved for continued use" is worth more in discovery than a two-year-old SAFER printout and seventy-eight loads of silence.

The Standard You're Actually Being Held To

Montgomery changed the question. It's not "did you comply with the FMCSRs." It's "did you act like a reasonably careful broker."

A reasonably careful broker doesn't check a carrier once and hand them eighty loads without ever looking again. That might be the industry norm. But post-May 2026, the industry norm isn't the defense it used to be. A plaintiff's lawyer will stand in front of a jury and describe exactly how much the carrier's safety metrics had deteriorated while you kept sending them work. The jury doesn't need to know what a BASIC score is to understand that you stopped checking.

Your approved carrier list is not a permanent permission slip. It's a list of carriers you most recently confirmed were safe. If that confirmation is two years old, you don't actually know whether they're still safe. You just haven't been asked about it yet.

The deposition question is coming. The only variable is whether you have an answer.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com