The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (“FMCSA”), an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation, created the online Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse (the “Clearinghouse”) portal to help keep impaired commercial drivers off the road.
But a recent investigation has exposed a dangerous loophole in the Clearinghouse. People without the required credentials reportedly created accounts posing as substance-abuse professionals, third-party administrators, and/or employers. They then used those accounts to move “professional” commercial drivers flagged for drug or alcohol violations through the return-to-duty process.
FMCSA has started to close the loophole, but the danger has not disappeared. The agency now requires identity verification for certain new Clearinghouse accounts. Existing accounts, however, will not be subject to the same verification process until a later phase. And the new safeguard does not identify the drivers who may already have been improperly cleared—and who may still be driving.
This is not merely a database problem. It is a corporate safety culture problem. Competent, safety-conscious motor carriers:
- Independently verify driver credentials;
- Confirm that any return-to-duty process is legitimate;
- Verify the credentials of the driver professionals involved;
- Obtain and review the underlying drug-and-alcohol testing documentation;
- Regularly audit driver qualification files;
- Investigate inconsistencies, gaps, and red flags;
- Train corporate safety personnel to identify and escalate concerns; and
- Place public safety above convenience, speed, and profit.
But some carriers are not competent, nor are they safety focused. In trucking litigation, the most important questions often arise before the crash. Why was the driver on the road? What did the carrier know? What should it have known? And did the company build a genuine safety program—or merely maintain a compliance checklist?
At O’Neill Friedman, we critically examine corporate decisions. Our trucking investigations look beyond the collision itself. We analyze the carrier’s hiring, qualification, supervision, training, and safety management practices. We examine the records, identify the warning signs, and determine whether the crash was truly an isolated event—or the foreseeable result of an earlier, improper corporate decision. A federal database can support a safety program, but it cannot replace a corporate commitment to safety.
Sources
Rob Carpenter, Clearinghouse Fraud Putting Drugged Drivers Back on the Road, FreightWaves (Mar. 25, 2026), https://www.freightwaves.com/news/clearinghouse-fraud-putting-drugged-drivers-back-on-the-road.
U.S. Dep’t of Transp., Fed. Motor Carrier Safety Admin., Cracking Down on Fraud: New Identity Checks for FMCSA Clearinghouse (Apr. 27, 2026), https://clearinghouse.fmcsa.dot.gov/Learn/News/Item/ID-verification.
