TDPortCarrier Vetting
The checks

FMCSA QCMobile

Identity, authority, insurance, BASICs, OOS rates, crashes, chameleon scan.

What this checks

The FMCSA QCMobile check is the foundation of every vetting. It pulls the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's own record on the carrier — the federal regulator's view of who they are, whether they're authorized to operate, what insurance they maintain on file, what their safety profile looks like, and what crashes and out-of-service events are in their recent history.

Most of what brokers and shippers think of as "checking the carrier" is contained here. It is also the data the federal regulator has affirmatively concluded should be public, which is why a court-defensible vetting record starts with it.

Where the data comes from

Two sources, in this order:

  1. Live call to FMCSA's QCMobile API. At the moment you run the check, the workbench attempts a live request to the regulator's own endpoint. When this succeeds, the captured data carries a fmcsa_live_at timestamp showing the exact moment FMCSA confirmed the data.
  2. Local FMCSA mirror. TDPort maintains a local copy of the bulk FMCSA datasets, refreshed on a schedule: MCMIS Census monthly, SMS (Safety Measurement System) monthly, Licensing & Insurance daily. When the live endpoint is down (which happens, especially after public events), we fall back to the mirror and record the failure honestly in the result.

The result page shows three timestamps: when the MCMIS data was last pulled, when the L&I data was last pulled, and the outcome of the live attempt (success or specific failure reason). The sealed cert preserves all three.

Sources: FMCSA QCMobile, FMCSA SAFER, FMCSA SMS.

What you'll see

The check returns ten rows of data, each with its own status:

  • Identity. Legal name, doing-business-as names, MC and DOT numbers, principal address, officers, EIN where filed.
  • Authority. Active / inactive, the type of authority (common, contract, broker), grant date, history.
  • Insurance. BMC-91 cargo and BMC-91X auto liability filings, current coverage amounts, effective dates, insurer name.
  • Safety rating. Satisfactory, Conditional, Unsatisfactory, or Not Rated — the FMCSA's own bottom-line assessment from their last compliance review.
  • CSA BASICs. Seven categories: Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, HOS Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hazmat, and Driver Fitness. Each carries a percentile and an alert flag if FMCSA's threshold is exceeded.
  • Out-of-service rates. Driver OOS percentage and vehicle OOS percentage, both compared against the national average.
  • Crash history. Twenty-four-month counts of fatal, injury, and tow-away crashes.
  • Operational profile. Power units, drivers, annual VMT, cargo classes, hazmat authorization.
  • Chameleon scan. A derived check: this MC number's shared principal officers and physical addresses against previously revoked or inactive MC numbers. Per CBS reporting, chameleon carriers are roughly four times more likely to be in severe crashes. The most important derived signal.
  • Freshness. The three timestamps described above.

Each row resolves to Clean, Flag, Alert, or Gray (not available). The colors carry FMCSA's own signal — a row marked Alert is marked Alert because FMCSA flagged that data point, not because TDPort decided to flag it.

What this does NOT tell you

  • It does not predict whether the carrier will crash. FMCSA's data is backwards-looking. A Satisfactory rating from a 2019 compliance review tells you what happened in 2019, not what's happening today.
  • It does not tell you whether the carrier is currently operating responsibly. A carrier with no recent inspections has no recent OOS rate; absence of data is not evidence of safety.
  • It does not verify the carrier's commercial fitness — on- time delivery, claims history, freight handling. Those signals don't live in FMCSA data and aren't pulled here.
  • It does not verify the truck and driver that show up at pickup are the carrier you vetted. That's what the pickup checklist is for.
  • It does not interpret the data. A Conditional rating means FMCSA found enough compliance problems during their last review to issue that rating; what that means for your load is your judgment to make.

What to do with the result

Things people commonly weigh, in no particular order:

  • Active authority is the floor. A carrier without active operating authority cannot legally take the load.
  • Insurance coverage at or above your contract minimum, on file with FMCSA, with a recent effective date.
  • Safety rating: Satisfactory or Not Rated are common; many active carriers are Not Rated because FMCSA hasn't done a compliance review yet, which is not itself a flag.
  • CSA BASIC alerts in the Unsafe Driving and Vehicle Maintenance categories — these are the BASICs most directly visible from the road.
  • Driver OOS rate well above the national average.
  • The chameleon scan finding shared officers or addresses with previously revoked MCs. This is the single highest-value derived signal here.
  • Recent authority grant date (under 90 days) tells you you're dealing with a brand-new entity, which warrants extra diligence on the other checks.

No item on this list, by itself, is a hire-or-reject. The point is what you can show you considered.

References