For owner-operators, keeping up with the paperwork required to maintain compliance can be daunting. Especially when the process is unfamiliar.

One of those paperwork hiccups that can create confusion involves reporting drug and alcohol testing results for the previous year.

While the information is not required to be reported by all carriers every year – only carriers with more than 1,000 employees are required to file it annually – the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration can periodically request that a carrier with fewer than 1,000 employees submit its results.

According to FMCSA, that data is used to “quantify the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse in the commercial motor vehicle industry” to determine the agency’s random drug and alcohol testing rates for the following year.

Have you received a notice from the U.S. DOT to submit drug and alcohol testing results?

If you are one of the carriers selected to report their 2025 drug and alcohol testing results, there are two important things you should know. First, the notice is legitimate and time-sensitive.

Carriers can often be bombarded with requests, making it difficult to discern which are valid and which are scams. Below is a copy of the FMCSA’s request for reference.

If you are a member of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and received a request, you can contact the Association’s compliance department to confirm the validity of the request.

Typically, those requests are sent out in early April via email and physical mail, with carriers given approximately three months from the date of notice to submit the results.

All carriers selected for the annual survey are required to participate and may face significant penalties for failing to do so. The current fines can range from $1,584 per day to $15,846 in total for failing to submit results.

How do you submit drug and alcohol testing results?

 The second thing carriers need to know about submitting results to the agency’s Drug and Alcohol Testing Management Information System is that you will have to do so on your own, even if you are a member of a drug and alcohol consortium.

Fortunately, the filing process is relatively simple and can be done entirely online.

The first thing you will need is a current Login.gov account. That account is used to securely sign in to government websites and serves several purposes.

For those who have not already established an account, it can be done online here. After entering and confirming your email, you will be prompted to set up a second layer of security. Once you have established multi-factor authentication, your Login.gov account will be ready to use.

Additional information on setting up your Login.gov account is available here.

After you have established an account, you will need to visit damis.dot.gov to input your results. New DAMIS users will be prompted to enter an activation code found on the FMCSA’s request letter. Existing users will simply need to use their Login.gov account to proceed.

Once you have accessed the system, you will input all testing results for the previous year. For carriers using a consortium, those totals will be provided to you by the consortium in a Management Information Systems report, which is typically prepared in March.

A more detailed walkthrough for submitting your results is available here. LL