How freight brokers should vet carriers after Montgomery: a written process an agent can run

Where vetting time actually goes

A new carrier asks to haul for you, or one of your carrier reps wants to book a carrier nobody at the brokerage has used before. Before the load moves, someone in compliance collects the packet: a W-9, a certificate of insurance, your broker-carrier agreement, authority details and contacts. Then the checks start: whether the operating authority is active, what the FMCSA record shows for safety, whether the insurer confirms the certificate, and whether the phone and email in the packet match the FMCSA record.

No single check is hard. The time goes into running all of them on every carrier while a rep waits to cover a load, and into the second round when something does not line up. Monitoring adds a steady stream on top: insurance cancellations, authority changes, contact changes and fraud reports from your vetting platform, and someone has to decide on each.

Fraud has made the work slower. A Transportation Intermediaries Association survey, as reported by FreightWaves in May 2025, counted 1,611 fraud reports from September 2024 through February 2025, up 65% on the prior period, and about 22% of respondents reported fraud losses above $200,000 in six months. Carrier Assure gives the example of a broker that books a carrier with an active MC number and later finds that the number had quietly changed hands, with the phone now routing to a scammer.

Most brokerages already pay for a vetting platform such as Highway, Truckstop RMIS, Carrier Assure or MyCarrierPortal. Someone still has to apply your own rules to what those tools report, and write down what was decided and why.

What changed in 2026

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II. The broker in that case had arranged a load with a carrier that allegedly held a conditional FMCSA safety rating, and the carrier's driver struck the plaintiff's stopped truck. The Court held unanimously that the motor vehicle safety exception in the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) saves a negligent hiring claim like this one from federal preemption. It did not decide whether the broker was negligent. Before the decision, brokers in some federal circuits could have crash claims of this kind dismissed on preemption grounds, and that argument no longer works for them.

The decision does not make brokers liable for every crash. Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Alito, wrote in a concurrence that brokers should be able to defend these suits successfully if they acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable trucking companies. What counts as reasonable is still open, and Benesch, a transportation law firm, wrote after the decision that nobody yet knows what reasonable care requires in practice. Benesch also notes that preemption may still apply to cargo claims where cargo security is distinct from safety, a question for your counsel.

FMCSA also changed how carriers register. Its new registration system, Motus, launched on May 19, 2026 and took over from the old Unified Registration System. New applicants now verify their identity with a government-issued ID. MC numbers have not gone away. FMCSA dropped their elimination from this release after stakeholder feedback and said it would take a measured approach in later releases. Key your carrier records on the USDOT number and keep the MC number as well.

Fraud moved too. Highway, a carrier identity vendor, reported that compromised inboxes, spoofed emails, account takeovers and impersonation calls made up 50% of the fraud vectors it classified in the second quarter of 2026, up from 42.7% in the first. Ownership change fraud, often called a sold MC, accounted for 25.6% of the thefts reported to it. These figures come from Highway's own network, but they point the same way as Carrier Assure's warning: a carrier can pass every paper check while someone else answers the phone.

Write the carrier standard first

Law firm advice since May has been consistent. Benesch tells brokers to adopt a written policy for how they onboard carriers and monitor their ongoing eligibility, to start from federally licensed motor carriers with active operating authority, and to discuss further criteria such as safety ratings and months in operation with their liability underwriter. Crowell & Moring advises brokers to keep a written record of how they vet and to follow a reasonable policy consistently. Benesch also warns that having a policy and routinely ignoring it is worse than having none.

Some lines leave no room for judgment. Under 49 CFR 385.13, a motor carrier rated unsatisfactory is prohibited from operating a commercial motor vehicle. An unsatisfactory rating on the FMCSA record should therefore block the carrier outright, with no override.

That last point shapes how you automate. An agent can only apply a standard that exists in writing. Write down each line: the authority age you accept, the safety ratings you accept, the insurance limits and endorsements you require for each kind of freight, how you verify contacts, and which findings send a carrier to a person. Then the agent can check every carrier against the same list, and every exception becomes a named person's decision with a reason attached.

Give the standard an owner and a date. When a rep asks for an exception to cover a load tonight, the request and the answer both go in the carrier file.

What a certificate of insurance proves, and what it does not

The certificate form itself says what it is. The ACORD 25 states that it is issued as a matter of information only, confers no rights upon the certificate holder and does not amend, extend or alter the coverage of the policies listed. It also warns that the limits shown may have been reduced by paid claims.

So a certificate shows that a policy was reported to exist on the day it was issued, with the limits shown. It cannot show that the policy is still in force today, that the truck hauling your load is a scheduled auto on that policy, or that the cargo cover will respond to a theft. Truckstop advises brokers to request the certificate from the carrier's insurer. Carrier Assure advises confirming the policy number directly with the insurance company and checking that the names on the certificate match the carrier you are booking.

The FMCSA record tells you something different. Under federal rules, a for-hire carrier's authority is issued and stays in force only while a public liability filing is on file. For interstate or foreign for-hire carriage of non-hazardous property in vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,001 pounds or more, the federal minimum is $750,000. Cargo insurance filings are required only of household goods carriers. For general freight, then, the FMCSA record shows nothing about cargo cover. Confirm the cover with the insurer and read the policy terms and endorsements that apply to the freight, since the ACORD 25 itself says the insurance it lists is subject to every exclusion and condition in those policies.

What to automate and what a person keeps

A workable rule: the agent compares the evidence with your standard and drafts the file. It never approves a carrier, and it never waives a line of your standard to cover a load. In practice the split falls roughly here.

The hard cases are the ones fraud creates. A packet can be complete and correct while the email domain in it was registered last week, or the phone number on the FMCSA record changed a few days after an ownership change. The agent's job in those cases is to notice and stop. A person calls the number that was on file before the change, or the carrier waits.

Controls to insist on before go-live

Every file the agent prepares waits for a named person, however clean it looks, and that stays true after go-live. These are the controls worth insisting on before the agent touches a live carrier:

• A carrier rated unsatisfactory on its FMCSA record is blocked, and the file offers no override.
• Contact details come only from the FMCSA record or your vetting platform, never from the packet or an email signature.
• Rate confirmations go only to a contact verified in the carrier file.
• Any change of ownership, phone, email or address on the FMCSA record sends the carrier back to a person.
• Every override of your standard records the person who made it and the reason.
• Vetting data arrives through your licensed integrations and FMCSA services. Carrier Assure, for one, prohibits automated extraction from its website without written permission.
• Each file keeps the source and time of every check, for as long as your counsel advises.

Worked example: what the hours look like

This is an illustrative example with assumed numbers, not a client result. Take a 60-person brokerage whose compliance desk sets up 40 new carriers a week, at about 30 minutes each from opening the packet to approval. That is 1,200 minutes, or 20 staff hours a week.

Now assume 30 of those 40 are clean, with active authority, an insurer that confirms the certificate, contacts that match FMCSA and no open flags. With an agent preparing the file, a specialist spends about 8 minutes reviewing and approving each one, so 240 minutes. The other 10 are exceptions and still take the full 30 minutes, another 300 minutes. Total time falls to 540 minutes, or 9 hours, which gives back 11 staff hours a week.

Monitoring alerts come on top. If the same desk clears 150 alerts a week at 5 minutes each, that is another 12.5 hours, much of it routine confirmation an agent can prepare. The calculator below covers new setups only.

The exception share moves the result more than any other number. A brokerage that onboards many new authorities, or works lanes that attract fraud, will see more exceptions and a smaller saving. The larger gain may be consistency, since every file now records the same checks with sources and times, which is the record counsel tells brokers to keep.

Starting small with carrier vetting

Pull last month's carrier setups. Count them and mark which ones were clean, with the minutes each one took. If your carrier standard lives in people's heads, write it down and have your transportation counsel review it along with your liability underwriter. Then run an agent against copies of those setups with nothing going live, and compare its files with the decisions your team actually made.

That test is roughly what our five-day AI Workflow Sprint does. You get a working prototype on your redacted carrier packets and a ranked list of workflows with staff hours attached, and the sprint ends with a fixed quote for the build. It costs $2,500 and the fee comes off the build, with a full refund if we do not find 10 staff hours a week.

This guide is general information, not legal advice. Your transportation counsel should review your vetting policy before you automate any part of it.

Common questions