So you’re about to run your annual MVRs on all of your drivers…then you’ll be set for another year, right? Think again! MVR programs are not like a Ronco® Rotisserie oven. You can’t just set it and forget it. Suppose Uncle Jed “forgot” to pay his child support last year. The state suspends his license until he goes back to court and gets current on his payments. What if Uncle Jed goes out and has an at-fault accident in a company vehicle while his license is suspended? How do you think that will play out for you in front of a jury when Uncle Jed is charged with vehicular manslaughter while driving on a suspended license that you should have known about? Ever heard of negligent entrustment? And how about some punitive damages to top it off? Even if Uncle Jed is in his own vehicle and running an errand for the company, you may still be on the hook by way of Respondeat Superior (which is Medieval Latin for “let the master answer”) if he is operating under the scope of his employment. And don’t even get me started on vicarious liability. Maybe that seems a bit far-fetched but with all due respect to Uncle Jed’s employer, those scenarios certainly can and do happen.
And why do they even call them Motor Vehicle Records when we are actually looking for the driver’s license record status reports? What we want to know is if Uncle Jed should be behind the wheel of our company vehicle?
You would think that in today’s globally connected, cloud-covered, SaaSy, big data, hyper-social media enriched world that our states could get their collective acts together enough to share motor vehicle records with each other. Well if you’ve been around the block a time or two and tried to order your own MVRs from various states, you already know better! Unless you have a secure network of direct connections to state DMV databases and criminal court clerk records from every county in every state, you are out of luck!
Believe it or not, some states don’t even have DMV databases. They rely on the criminal court clerks from around their state to submit the court records, which unfortunately, doesn’t always happen in a timely manner. Even if you only do business in a couple of states, isn’t it fun when the state changes their process or redesigns their MVR database structure and website to “better serve you” and they don’t tell you?
Simply pulling an MVR once a year doesn’t quite cut it. Pulling MVRs multiple times a year can be very costly depending on the state and very inefficient, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of drivers. What you need is a comprehensive solution for not only pulling MVRs but also monitoring MVRs on a monthly basis. If you are up for an exhausting and painful experience in frustration with a lack of return on the investment of your time and energy, then by all means go ahead and figure out all the nuances of a monitoring program and do it yourself.
Order Motor Vehicle Records (MVRs) the easy way through Driver’s Alert.