What Carrier Archive provides — stated plainly
This page exists so that you, your insurer, or your attorney can see exactly what our records are, what they are not, and how they fit the standard of care courts and insurance carriers describe for hiring motor carriers. No marketing on this page — just the facts of the service.
The legal environment, in the courts' words
Two rulings frame why documented carrier vetting matters:
Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II (U.S. Supreme Court, May 2026, unanimous): state-law negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by federal law. Brokers can be sued in state court over their carrier selection. Legal commentary on the ruling notes that documented, systematic vetting is more likely to serve as a defense than to create liability.
Ruling analysis → Schramm v. Foster, 341 F. Supp. 2d 536 (D. Md. 2004) addressed reasonable care in selecting a carrier under Maryland law on its own facts, including inquiry into available safety information. It does not prescribe a national checklist, and it does not establish that using any service satisfies a duty of care. What constitutes reasonable care remains a state-law question decided case by case.
Case discussion → Separately, your insurance policy may impose carrier-selection or documentation conditions. The policy language governs — read it, or ask your licensed insurance professional.
What we provide
- Federal record lookups — a carrier's identity, operating authority, insurance filing history, and government actions, drawn from named federal (FMCSA) datasets, with every line citing its source and date.
- Daily record monitoring — for carriers under an active watch, we check daily for newly available federal source data and email you after a material change (insurance cancellation, authority action, out-of-service order) appears in it. Each monitoring event records per-source status, including when a source published nothing new or was unavailable.
- An alert ledger — every alert we send is logged with a UTC timestamp, the recipient address, and what changed. Sent alerts appear in your records, so the system's recorded transmissions and their timestamps can be inspected. A transmission log does not prove receipt or review.
- Dated Verification Records — a PDF stating what the cited federal sources showed for a carrier on a specific date, generated from our archived daily snapshots. Records are available for any date the carrier was under your active watch, reconstructed on request — including weeks or months later. Each record carries its snapshot timestamps, source dataset dates, a report ID, and a tamper-evident hash — and always shows both the original monitoring date and the date the report itself was generated, so a later-created report can never be mistaken for a contemporaneous document. Anyone holding a copy can confirm it is on file and unaltered at carrierarchive.com/verify, using the reference number and hash printed on its Certificate of Verification; the day's evidence manifest carries two outside timestamps (RFC 3161 and OpenTimestamps).
The monitoring-record rule: records exist for dates a carrier was under an active watch. Monitoring begins when you add a carrier and cannot be added retroactively — which is exactly why the records are credible.
What we are not
- We are not a safety certification. A record documents what federal sources showed; it does not certify that any carrier is safe, reliable, or suitable.
- We are not a legal opinion or a guarantee. Whether any particular process satisfies a duty of care is a question for your counsel under your state's law.
- We do not verify identity. Federal company records cannot confirm that the person who called, emailed, or dispatched is the carrier they claim to be.
- We are not a consumer reporting agency, and our service may not be used for employment, credit, insurance-underwriting, or housing decisions about any individual. Commercial freight-verification use only.
- Federal data can lag reality. We report what the source shows and when it showed it; the source itself may trail real-world events.
- We do not select or recommend carriers. The decision to use a carrier is yours; we take no part in it and endorse no one.
Disputes and corrections
Our records document the federal record; they do not adjudicate it. If you are a carrier and believe the underlying federal data is wrong, corrections happen at the source, through the process FMCSA designates for that data type: safety data (crashes, inspections) is generally reviewed through DataQs, while registration, authority, and company-information updates use FMCSA's separate registration procedures. Once the source corrects, our next snapshot reflects it, dated. Safety-rating review has its own FMCSA process (49 CFR 385.15); DataQs does not decide every rating dispute. For an error in what Carrier Archive itself shows or computes, email support@carrierarchive.com: we review promptly and keep dated history, marking corrections rather than rewriting evidence.
Retention and export
Records and the alert ledger are retained for the period stated in your plan and are exportable at any time. We state retention windows explicitly rather than promising "forever."