DOT audit requirements, triggers and what to expect

DOT audit requirements depend on the type of review. "DOT audit" is one phrase for three different things. A new entrant safety audit happens to every carrier in the first months after its USDOT number is activated, under §385.307, and nothing triggers it but the calendar. A compliance review is triggered by something specific: a complaint, a crash, a pattern in roadside inspections, or a safety score crossing one of FMCSA's intervention thresholds. It is the only one of the three that ends in a safety rating under §385.9. A focused investigation is narrower and looks at one problem area. This page covers what starts each one, what the investigator will ask to see, how the outcome is decided, and what happens after.

The three reviews, and who gets which

Part 385 defines two of them in §385.3. A safety audit is "an examination of a motor carrier's operations to provide educational and technical assistance" and to check that the carrier has basic safety management controls in place. A compliance review is an examination of a carrier's records and operations to decide whether it meets the safety fitness standard in §385.5. The words matter. A safety audit is meant to teach. A compliance review is meant to rate.

The third, the focused investigation, is not defined in the CFR at all. It comes from FMCSA's Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, the enforcement policy that sits on top of Part 385. Under CSA, roadside inspection and crash data feed the Safety Measurement System, which sorts each carrier's violations into seven categories called BASICs. When a carrier's measure in one category passes an intervention threshold, FMCSA can respond with a warning letter, an offsite investigation, an onsite focused investigation of that category, or a full onsite investigation, which is the compliance review under another name. The thresholds are policy, not regulation, and FMCSA changes them without a rulemaking, which is why this page does not quote a percentile.

In practice: a carrier in its first 18 months gets a new entrant safety audit, and everyone does. An established carrier whose data shows a problem in one area gets a focused investigation of that area, which can produce violations but is not by itself a rating. An established carrier with a broader problem, a serious complaint, a fatal crash, or a request to change an existing rating gets a compliance review, which ends in satisfactory, conditional or unsatisfactory. A focused investigation that finds enough can widen into a compliance review, and knowing which one you are in tells you what is at stake.

What triggers a compliance review

There is no schedule. An established carrier with clean data can go a decade without seeing an investigator. Reviews happen because something put the carrier on a list, and the lists are fed by a few known sources.

• Roadside inspections. Every inspection report, clean or not, goes into the Safety Measurement System. Violations are weighted by severity and recency, then compared with carriers of similar size. For a fleet under ten trucks the data is thin, so a handful of bad inspections in a year moves the measure a long way.
• Crashes. A reportable crash, particularly one with a fatality, is the most common single trigger for a full review. The Crash Indicator BASIC counts crashes regardless of fault.
• Complaints. Anyone can file one through the National Consumer Complaint Database. Driver complaints about coercion to drive over hours or with a defective vehicle are investigated.
• A prior conditional rating. A carrier rated conditional stays conditional until it asks for a change under §385.17. That request brings a review of its own.
• A failed or incomplete new entrant audit. Carriers that needed a corrective action plan to pass tend to be looked at again inside the 18-month monitoring period in §385.307.
• Referral. A roadside officer who sees something that looks like a company problem rather than a driver problem can refer the carrier. So can a state agency.

Note what is not on that list. Updating the MCS-150 under §390.19, changing insurers, or adding trucks does not trigger a compliance review. FMCSA has proposed more than once to change how safety fitness is determined, including using roadside data directly. As of this page's review date, a rating still comes only from a compliance review under Part 385.

What happens in the first months: the new entrant audit

A new entrant is any carrier that applies for a USDOT number, under §385.3. Once the number is activated, the carrier is monitored for 18 months under §385.307, and during that period an auditor conducts a safety audit, generally not before the carrier has been running for three months, because there need to be records to look at. The definition in §385.3 puts the audit within 12 months of activation for a property carrier and within 120 days for a passenger carrier. Refusing the audit is not an option: §385.337 gives a carrier that refuses ten days to agree in writing before its registration is revoked.

The audit is educational by definition, and the normal outcome is a list of things to fix. It is still possible to fail outright, and the list of what fails you is short and specific. Under §385.321(b), a new entrant automatically fails the audit if it is found to have violated any one of these:

1. No alcohol and controlled substances testing program at all (§382.115).
2. Using a driver known to have an alcohol concentration of 0.04 or higher (§382.201).
3. Using a driver who refused a drug or alcohol test (§382.211).
4. Using a driver who tested positive for a controlled substance (§382.215).
5. No random testing program (§382.305).
6. Knowingly using a driver without a valid CDL (§383.3 and §383.23).
7. Knowingly allowing a driver with a suspended, revoked or cancelled CDL to drive (§383.37).
8. Knowingly allowing a disqualified driver to operate a commercial motor vehicle (§383.51).
9. Operating a vehicle without the required financial responsibility (§387.7).
10. Operating a passenger vehicle without the required coverage (§387.31).
11. Knowingly using a disqualified driver (§391.15).
12. Knowingly using a driver who is not physically qualified, which includes an expired medical certificate (§391.11).
13. Failing to require drivers to keep records of duty status, where 51 percent or more of the records examined show the violation (§395.8).
14. Requiring or permitting a vehicle under an out-of-service order to be driven (§396.9).
15. Failing to correct out-of-service defects before the vehicle is used again (§396.11).
16. Using a vehicle that has not had its periodic inspection, where 51 percent or more of the vehicles examined show the violation (§396.17).

Sixteen items, fourteen of them single-occurrence. One driver with a lapsed medical certificate is enough. None is a paperwork gap in the ordinary sense; each is a driver or a vehicle that should not have been on the road, or a testing program that does not exist.

A new entrant can also fail without hitting any of the sixteen, under §385.321(a), if it lacks basic safety management controls as scored under Appendix A to Part 385, which scores acute and critical violations by factor and fails a carrier when three or more of the six factors score badly enough. That is a much higher bar than the list above.

When the audit is over, the auditor goes through the findings with the carrier, under §385.319(a). A pass brings written notice within 45 days and the monitoring continues to the end of the 18 months. A fail brings written notice, also within 45 days, that the registration will be revoked unless the carrier does what the notice says. A property carrier has 60 days from the notice to do it, under §385.319(c)(1); passenger and hazardous materials carriers have 45. What the carrier submits is the corrective action plan: a written account of each deficiency and what was done about it, with the records that prove it. §385.323 lets FMCSA extend the 60 days by up to 60 more if the carrier is making a good-faith effort.

What the investigator asks for

The compliance review and the safety audit look at the same records; the difference is what the investigator does with what they find. Both work through the six factors in Appendix B to Part 385, and the compliance checklist on this site follows the same six. An investigator may ask for less than the table below, and can ask for more.

That last row is why a safety review asks for your mileage: it is the denominator of the crash rate. Revenue is asked for because it is on the MCS-150, and the auditor checks the form.

Two things about how records are handed over. First, the request comes with a date, and the records are due by it. §385.307(c) says the records required for a safety audit "shall be made available for inspection upon request", and a compliance review works the same way. Second, a record you cannot produce is a record you do not have. §390.32 is the section that lets any required record be kept electronically, and it sets the test: the record must be capable of being retained, used for the purpose it was made for, and "accurately reproduced within required timeframes for reference by any party entitled to access". Paper is held to the same standard and remains fully acceptable. The format is never the question. Whether you can put the record in the investigator's hands by the date on the letter is the question, and a file in a portal you cannot log in to, or in the cab of a truck two states away, does not pass.

Driver qualification files are kept three years after the driver leaves, under §391.51(c), and the other clocks are in the retention guide. An investigator can ask for anything inside those windows, which is how a carrier gets asked for the qualifications of every mechanic who ever signed an inspection report.

How the rating is decided

Only a compliance review produces a rating. §385.9 says FMCSA assigns it using the factors in §385.7 as computed under the Safety Fitness Rating Methodology in Appendix B to Part 385, and issues it within 30 days of the review. The three possible outcomes are defined in §385.3:

• Satisfactory. The carrier has adequate safety management controls to meet the standard in §385.5.
• Conditional. The carrier does not have adequate controls to ensure compliance, which could result in the kinds of violations the standard lists. The carrier keeps operating.
• Unsatisfactory. The carrier does not have adequate controls and violations of the kind the standard lists have occurred. Under §385.13, a carrier with a final unsatisfactory rating is prohibited from operating.

Appendix B is the part worth reading in full, because it explains why one missing document and ten missing documents are not the same violation. It divides the regulations into two lists. Acute regulations are the ones where "noncompliance is so severe as to require immediate corrective actions by a motor carrier regardless of the overall safety posture" of the carrier. Using a driver with a suspended CDL is acute. One instance counts. Critical regulations are the ones that indicate a breakdown in management controls, and a critical violation counts only when it forms a pattern. Appendix B sets the pattern: "the number of violations required to meet a pattern is equal to at least 10 percent of those examined". A single driver file without an annual review is a violation the investigator will note. The same review missing from two files out of ten is a pattern of a critical violation, and it scores.

The scoring is simple. Each acute violation and each critical pattern is one point in its factor, except hours of service patterns, which are two. A factor with no points is satisfactory, one point is conditional, two or more is unsatisfactory. Then the factor ratings combine: no unsatisfactory factors and no more than two conditional ones is a satisfactory carrier; more conditional factors than that, or one unsatisfactory factor, is a conditional carrier; anything worse is unsatisfactory. The accident factor is scored on the recordable crash rate rather than on violations, and the hazardous materials factor only applies to carriers that haul it.

That structure is why the advice on this site keeps coming back to the same document across many drivers rather than the odd gap in one file. A carrier with five drivers has five files, and one missing document is already 20 percent of them. At that size there is no such thing as an isolated gap, and the same lapse in two files is a pattern by any reading of the rule.

After the review

For a compliance review, §385.11 requires written notice of the rating within 30 days. If the rating is satisfactory, or is an improvement on a previous unsatisfactory, it is final on the date of the notice. Any other rating is proposed first. A proposed conditional or unsatisfactory rating becomes final 60 days after the notice for a property carrier and 45 days for passenger and placarded hazardous materials carriers, under §385.11(c). The notice lists the deficiencies that produced the rating.

In those 60 days a carrier can request administrative review under §385.15 if it believes FMCSA got the facts or the rule wrong, or fix what the notice lists and ask for a rating change under §385.17. That request goes in writing to the FMCSA Service Center for the carrier's region, describing the corrective action taken, with the documentation. For a proposed unsatisfactory rating FMCSA reviews the request within 45 days for a property carrier, under §385.17(e), and can allow up to 60 more days of operation while it does if the carrier is making a good-faith effort, under §385.17(g). A carrier rated conditional can request a change at any time, and many carry the rating for years because nobody wrote the letter.

A proposed unsatisfactory that becomes final brings an out-of-service order under §385.13(d) and revocation of operating authority under §385.13(e). Separately from the rating, any violation found in any of the three reviews can be the subject of civil penalties under Part 386. For a new entrant, the sequence is the one under §385.319: notice within 45 days, a corrective action period, then a decision on whether the registration stands.

How long does it take? A new entrant audit for a carrier with a few trucks is usually a single session once the records are in. A compliance review of a small carrier runs a day or two on site, longer if the records arrive piecemeal. The weeks either side are where the time goes.

What you can do now

Not a binder assembled the week the letter arrives. The investigator is testing whether your controls work every week, and the records are how you show it, so the useful work is the boring kind.

• Know where each record on the table above lives, and who can produce it if you are not there. If the answer is "in the truck" for anything, that is the first fix.
• Read the sixteen automatic-failure items against your own operation. Each is a yes-or-no question, and they are the questions a compliance review asks first.
• Check the clocks that expire quietly: medical certificates, annual driving record reviews, periodic inspections on every unit including trailers, and the Clearinghouse annual query. The pattern rule means one lapsed date across several drivers is worth more, in the wrong direction, than one bad file.
• Check the six-month and three-year retention windows in the retention guide, because the review reaches back as far as the rule lets it.
• If you have ever been rated conditional and fixed the problem, write the §385.17 letter. Nothing changes until you do.

Software helps with exactly one part of this: the dates, and producing the records in one place on the day they are asked for. Ledger Road does that, including an export an investigator can open without a login, which is what the §390.32 reproduction test is about. A carrier with three trucks and a good filing cabinet meets the same test, and the spreadsheet guide says where the line is.