Paperwork, toll management are top issues for carriers going into 2025

“All this information resides in different places, which makes it very hard to feel comfortable that you could successfully get through an audit,” Precia said.

According to the survey, only 35% of respondents believed their fleet would “definitely” pass a DOT audit. The other 65% of fleet operators were not so confident in passing an audit. Among those less confident respondents, 87% blamed the issue on compliance documentation problems.

Poor compliance documentation can mean missed deadlines for renewing certifications, out-of-service orders during roadside inspections, and penalties. According to FMCSA’s latest Motor Carrier Safety Progress Report, 44% of federal carrier investigations resulted in a notice of claims penalty in the first half of 2024.

See also: Get your compliance house in order

The issue is more than hypothetical; it presented an issue for respondents onboarding new drivers, too. More than half of the professionals surveyed, 55%, named complex documentation requirements as a top barrier to onboarding new drivers. As many as 54% of fleets surveyed also saw challenges with background checks and driver verification delays.

While CDL and medical certificate upkeep is a driver’s responsibility, carriers have an interest in making sure their drivers comply to avoid fees and out-of-service issues.

“As I’m trying to hire a CDL driver, there are all these things I have to do,” Precia said. “I have to go and do safety performance history checks, I have to do drug tests, I have to do all these things that might come out of different solutions. You can imagine cobbling all that together to one version of a driver file becomes really difficult.”

The paperwork challenge is especially true for smaller fleets and owner-operators, Precia said, where the compliance professional likely wears many other hats.

Mastering the web of toll management

Another challenge particularly difficult for small fleets is tackling tolls.

Smaller fleets need to focus on their top-line revenue—delivering goods and doing so as efficiently as possible, Precia said. But, as operations expand, toll management becomes more complicated.

“As fleets grow, tolls become this web if you’re not paying attention to toll violations, not paying attention to transponders not working, and you’re not managing the data,” Precia said.

Fleetworthy reported that 93% of its respondents faced significant challenges in managing tolls. Professionals’ top toll challenges were: inability to predict expenses each month (44%); complexity with multiple transponders and toll accounts (39%); frequent violations and penalties (37%); inefficient manual payments (33%); administrative costs (31%); and toll management solution customer support (31%).

In a company’s growing web of tolls, the issues tend to stack. Malfunctioning transponders and slow payments can incur fees, driving up costs and making toll expense predictions difficult.

“First, it becomes a violation, then it becomes a penalty, then it becomes a larger penalty,” Precia said. “If you don’t have a 360-degree view of what’s going on with your toll program, it becomes very expensive—and it’s usually after the fact if you’re trying to manage it yourself.”

Carriers can lean on compliance and toll management solutions like Fleetworthy’s to better keep track of—and optimize—their administrative processes.