More than 202,000 commercial license holders currently sit in federally prohibited status. Roughly four in five of them have not taken the first step toward getting that status lifted.
A truck driver background check is what keeps those drivers out of the cab. Federal law requires it. Georgia law orders carriers to follow those federal rules, and the paperwork either exists or it does not.
Below, we explain what a carrier had to find out before dispatch. We also cover why a 2020 Georgia decision put the company’s own conduct in front of the jury.
What a Truck Driver Background Check Must Cover
Four separate inquiries sit in one regulation, and each leaves a record.
Driving history comes first. Section 391.23(a)(1) requires “an inquiry, within 30 days of the date the driver’s employment begins.” That inquiry goes to each licensing authority that issued the driver a license in the preceding three years.
Prior employers come next. Subsection (a)(2) requires “an investigation of the driver’s safety performance history.” That history reaches DOT-regulated employers across the same three years.
Crashes get their own paragraph. Subsection (d) covers accident records for the three years before the employment application.
Drug and alcohol violations complete the set. Subsection (e) reaches violations within the previous three years. Since , a covered employer “must use the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse” to satisfy it.
Subsection (m) requires one more verification. The medical examiner who certified the driver must appear on the National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners.
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Here the regulation gives carriers freedom on method and none at all on proof.
The investigation itself is flexible. It “may consist of personal interviews, telephone interviews, letters, or any other method for investigating that the carrier deems appropriate.”
Documentation is not. Each carrier “must make a written record” for “each previous employer contacted, or good faith efforts to do so.” That record names the employer and its address, the date of contact, and the information received.
Then comes the sentence with no escape hatch. “Failures to contact a previous employer, or of them to provide the required safety performance history information, must be documented.”
That record lives in its own file. Section 391.53 creates a driver investigation history file, separate from the qualification file. So a carrier that never looked has two empty folders rather than one.
Why the Company Answers, Not Just the Driver
Georgia law on this point changed in November 2020, and older pages still describe the old rule.
Quynn v. Hulsey, 310 Ga. 473 (2020), ended what the Supreme Court of Georgia called the Respondeat Superior Rule. Under that rule, a company conceding vicarious liability won summary judgment. Five claims disappeared at once: “negligent entrustment, hiring, training, supervision, and retention.”
The Court held the rule dead. Its words: “the Respondeat Superior Rule has been abrogated by OCGA § 51-12-33.” Georgia’s apportionment statute requires a jury to weigh the fault of everyone who contributed.
Read the reasoning, because it is simple. Claims that an employer was negligent “are divisible from claims that its employee was negligent.”
So the hiring decision is its own slice of fault. A trucking company can no longer admit its driver was negligent and keep its hiring file away from a jury.
What the Company Had to Know
Georgia’s negligent hiring duty comes from a short statute and an easier standard than most people expect.
Section 34-7-20 states it directly. The employer must “exercise ordinary care in the selection of employees and not to retain them after knowledge of incompetency.”
Actual knowledge is not the test. Take Munroe v. Universal Health Services, 277 Ga. 861 (2004). The Supreme Court applied what the employer “knew or in the exercise of ordinary care should have known,” so constructive knowledge suffices.
Negligent entrustment runs harder. That claim requires actual knowledge that the driver is incompetent or habitually reckless. Hiring and retention are therefore the better theories.
One Georgia trucking case closes the circle. Smith v. Tommy Roberts Trucking Co., 209 Ga. App. 826 (1993), starts from a concession: Georgia ordinarily imposes no duty to investigate a driver.
Yet “where the owner has a statutory duty to check on the driver’s qualifications,” the rule flips. A carrier cannot then claim it “did not have actual knowledge of such incompetence.”
The court refused to “reward the employer for remaining ignorant despite its legal duty to discover the facts.” A company cannot stay in the dark on purpose.
Georgia supplies that statutory duty. Under O.C.G.A. § 40-1-8(h)(1), a motor carrier “shall comply” with the “motor carrier safety standards found in 49 C.F.R. Part 391,” and subsection (j) makes a violation a misdemeanor.
Honesty about the limit helps here. No Georgia appellate decision holds that a Part 391 violation is negligence per se. So Smith and § 34-7-20 carry the claim instead of a shortcut.
The Check That Did Not Exist Before 2020
One federal database changed what a carrier can plausibly claim not to have known.
The Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse opened on . A carrier must run a full query before hiring and a limited query every year afterward.
Scale explains why it matters. FMCSA’s December 2025 monthly report counted 202,345 license holders in prohibited status. Of those, 159,226 had never started the return-to-duty process.
Consequences reach the license now too. A 2021 final rule took effect for compliance purposes on . State licensing agencies must now strip commercial driving privileges from a prohibited driver’s license.
Why the Annual Review Often Matters More
Hiring is one duty. Keeping a driver is another, and the second one produces more claims.
Section 391.25 requires an annual inquiry into each driver’s record and a documented annual review of it. A company that hired a clean driver and kept a deteriorating one fails that duty rather than the hiring duty.
One recent Georgia decision shows the pattern. Take Onsite Communication Services, LLC v. Gooch, No. A26A0424 (Ga. Ct. App. ). The Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of summary judgment to the employer.
Two facts drove it. Supervisors heard that a driver used methamphetamine and did not test him. He also reported four or five speeding tickets in company trucks, drawing no reprimand and no retraining.
What Older Pages Get Wrong
Four claims circulate on this subject, and none holds up.
A widely repeated statistic says driver-related factors caused 31 percent of large truck crashes. That number comes from an FMCSA presentation titled “Large Truck Crash Misconceptions.” The agency’s word is “coded” rather than caused, its data covers fatal crashes only, and speeding, distraction and lane-keeping each ran under 8 percent.
Medical exams are not optional. Section 391.41(a) bars operating a commercial motor vehicle “unless he or she is medically certified as physically qualified.” Blood pressure appears as a standard at § 391.41(b)(6).
Paper time logs are gone. Electronic logging devices became mandatory for covered carriers on .
The age rules deserve precision as well. Interstate drivers must still be 21 under § 391.11(b)(1). Georgia sets 18 for intrastate work under § 40-1-8(b)(2)(A). A federal pilot briefly let 18-to-20-year-olds cross state lines, and it ended on with four apprentices enrolled.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Three sets of figures fit a hiring page better than any crash-causation statistic.
Driver records tell the story first. NHTSA reported that 19.3 percent of large-truck drivers in 2024 fatal crashes had a previously recorded crash. Another 17.0 percent carried a previous speeding conviction. Both are rates among drivers involved, not findings of cause.
Roadside enforcement tells it again. During the 2025 International Roadcheck, inspectors placed 3,342 drivers out of service. Among them: 810 with no commercial license, 493 with no medical card, and 170 on a suspended license.
Georgia carries real exposure. The state recorded 189 large trucks in fatal crashes in 2024 and 197 deaths. Of those killed, 24 rode in the truck, 142 sat in other vehicles, and 31 were on foot.
Location concentrates the risk. Georgia’s own reporting put 53 percent of large-truck crashes in the ten Atlanta-region counties, Clayton among them.
Talk to a Morrow Truck Accident Lawyer
Shane Smith Law subpoenas the qualification file, the investigation history file, the Clearinghouse query, and every annual review. Carriers keep those records for only three years after a driver leaves, so the request has to go out early. Call (980) 246-2656 for a free consultation.
