FAQ & Help

It gives your team a simple PASS / WARN / FAIL carrier screening workflow, plus a fleet-intelligence layer that surfaces what equipment the carrier actually runs — tractors, trailers, axle configs, and the trailers each tractor most often pulls. Every screen saves a timestamped Carrier Selection Record automatically.

When you screen a carrier, DOTScreener also returns a fleet roster — the tractors and trailers observed under that carrier, their year/make/model, axle and length specs, the plates they run, and the trailer↔tractor pairings most often seen together. It's derived from verified public-record sources and manufacturer specifications, not carrier self-report. The full method is proprietary; what you see is what's there.

No. DOTScreener is an operational documentation tool, not legal advice or a guarantee of any outcome. It documents the information your team reviewed at the time of selection so you have a contemporaneous, organized record.

No. DOTScreener works alongside Carrier411, RMIS, SaferWatch, Highway, your TMS, and your existing process. It adds the documentation record most teams are missing.

Under 60 seconds. Enter an MC or DOT number, review the result against your policy, and the record is saved automatically — no extra steps, no training.

No. The carrier receives one email with one link. They review the attestation built for that screen — a standard core set plus any checks tied to the specific concerns the screening surfaced — sign once, and they're done. Whether an attestation is requested at all is driven by your policy and the screen result (it can be not required, recommended, or required). No account, no login, no uploads. The broker already has their COI on file.

Upload a certificate of insurance as a PDF or a phone photo — even an iPhone HEIC snapshot — and DOTScreener reads it automatically with AI-powered document OCR. It pulls out the structured details that matter: each liability and cargo coverage with its limit, deductible, and effective/expiration dates, plus every truck and trailer VIN on the schedule (each VIN is then decoded against NHTSA vPIC for make, model, and year). Before anything is attached, an identity guard cross-checks the certificate's own named insured — legal name, USDOT/MC, and address — against the carrier you're screening. If they don't match, the document is quarantined and flagged so a wrong-carrier COI never lands on your record or your fleet data. Everything captured becomes part of the same tamper-evident screening file.

Inside DOTScreener, the screen cannot be marked APPROVED — the diligence-file artifact — until the carrier's signature lands. This is server-enforced and applies to DOTScreener's approval state, not to your underlying load-management system. The result is a clean evidentiary record that you did not move the load to APPROVED status in your diligence file without the attestation in hand.

A single tamper-evident PDF auto-generated the moment you approve the load. It bundles the FMCSA snapshot, insurance filing history, OOS order records, the carrier's signed attestation, and a SHA-256 tamper-evident audit trail. If a claim ever arises, you have one clean document ready for your insurer or attorney.

Every event in a screening — data pull, risk evaluation, attestation signature, approval — is hashed with SHA-256 and linked to the previous event's hash. If anyone altered or deleted an event after the fact, the chain would break and the tampering would be visible. This gives the record the same tamper-evidence property used in blockchain systems, without the complexity.

All carrier data is pulled live from the FMCSA at the moment of screening. DOTScreener queries QCMobile (safety scores, crash and inspection history), L&I (insurance filings with expiration dates), the Out-of-Service order feed (389k+ records), and Census (authority status, entity type). No cached databases, no stale snapshots.

Every new broker or shipper account starts with a 14-day free trial of the full product — unlimited carrier reviews, your whole team, no credit card to start. After the trial it's $99/month plus $14.99/month per additional user, with unlimited screens and Verifi™ included.

No. The subscription includes unlimited carrier reviews — no per-review billing, no monthly cap, no overage. Shipper Intelligence ($199/month) is the only separate add-on.

A carrier review is a point-in-time documented evaluation of a motor carrier's FMCSA safety data, insurance filings, authority status, and operational indicators. DOTScreener pulls this data live, applies your review workflow, and generates a timestamped record of the screening result.

Census Intelligence enriches every review with data from the FMCSA Census file — prior-revoked authorities, shared phone/email/address/officer indicators, fleet-vs-driver mismatches, stale MCS-150 filings, and relationship cluster signals. It surfaces operational risk indicators that standard SAFER lookups miss.

Yes — continuous monitoring is included with every account. Carriers you approve or dispatch are watched automatically (you can also pin or pause any carrier). Every day we re-check them against live FMCSA data and alert you — in the app and by email — when something material changes: authority status, safety rating, insurance filings, or a new out-of-service order. When a change is serious enough to worsen a carrier's result, DOTScreener re-runs the screening under your policy and files a fresh, dated Carrier Selection Record so your diligence file shows you caught it.

Absolutely. Shippers who select or approve carriers bear the same duty of reasonable care as brokers. DOTScreener documents the shipper's carrier-selection process with the same timestamped, tamper-evident records.

Nothing. Carrier profiles on DOTScreener are always free — no card, no subscription. You claim your profile, keep your COI / equipment / contact info current, and brokers can pull it without back-and-forth.

No. Sign up, enter an MC or DOT number, and run your first carrier review in under 60 seconds. There's no onboarding process, no data imports, and no IT involvement required.

For larger organizations we layer SSO, custom retention windows, and the carrier-screening API on through the enterprise contact form on our pricing page. We work with insurer compliance teams, large brokers, and shipper-side procurement.