Clearinghouse Reaches Three Years of Data, Ending Manual Drug and Alcohol Checks With Prior Employers

On January 6, 2023, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse reached three full years of stored violation data. From that date, a pre-employment query of the Clearinghouse became the way FMCSA-regulated employers meet the requirement to look into a prospective CDL driver's drug and alcohol violations over the previous three years.

Why the date mattered

Federal rules require carriers to find out, before hiring, whether a driver violated any DOT drug and alcohol rule in the past three years. When the Clearinghouse launched in 2020 it held no history, so FMCSA required carriers to do two things: query the database and also contact prior employers by hand.

That manual step was unreliable. Brandon Wiseman, president of Trucksafe Consulting, said during a DriverReach webinar reported by FleetOwner: "When sending out these manual queries to the previous employers, you may get a 50% response rate if you're lucky."

FMCSA's January 6 notice said prospective employers must now run a pre-employment query under 49 CFR 382.701(a) to meet the inquiry requirements in sections 382.413(b) and 391.23(e)(4), and that "Inquiries not conducted under § 382.701(a) will not satisfy these inquiry requirements."

What did not change

The Clearinghouse contains information only on drivers employed by FMCSA-regulated employers. If an applicant worked within the past three years for an employer regulated by another DOT agency, such as the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Transit Administration or the Federal Aviation Administration, carriers still had to request violation information from that employer directly.

Annual queries were also unchanged. Employers must query the Clearinghouse at least once a year for every CDL driver they employ, on a rolling 12-month basis.

Carriers also still had to contact previous employers for non-drug-and-alcohol information under 49 CFR 391.23, including employment verification and whether the driver was involved in DOT-recordable crashes.

The numbers behind the database

FleetOwner reported that more than 3 million CDL drivers and more than 420,000 motor carriers had registered in the Clearinghouse. As of October 2022 data, 171,957 drug violations had been reported over three years, compared with around 4,000 alcohol violations. Marijuana was the most common positive result, with 95,076 positive tests. FleetOwner also reported that 113,995 drivers were in prohibited status and that 86,500 of them had not started the return-to-duty process.

A second phase was scheduled for November 18, 2024, when state driver licensing agencies were to begin querying the Clearinghouse before issuing, renewing or upgrading a CDL.

What it means for drivers and fleets

For safety and hiring departments, the January 2023 change removed the paperwork of chasing prior employers for drug and alcohol records, but it did not remove every obligation. Carriers still needed a properly conducted pre-employment query, direct requests to non-FMCSA DOT employers, annual queries on current drivers and the separate employment and crash-history checks.

Wiseman also pointed to one responsibility that remained: "If you're going to hire a driver who has tested positive for drugs or alcohol in the past, it's now going to be your responsibility to make sure that driver follows through with follow-up tests." For drivers, the change meant a violation record followed them into every hiring decision through a single database rather than depending on whether a former employer answered a letter.