DOT Random Testing – Stand Alone or Consortium

DOT Random Drug Testing Consortium:

DOT-regulated companies must have a random drug testing program. How does this work?

Why DOT Needs Randomized Drug Testing - It's All About Safety Are you concerned about safety as an employer? Yes, of course, random drug testing can prevent accidents and discourage drug use.

The company DOT test plan must always be separate and distinct from your private company or non-DOT test plan. This also applies to your random test pool. DOT and non-DOT random test pools must be completely separated. There are two types of DOT random testing pools - independent or joint.

Independent Pool - The random testing pool consists of participants from one company and is therefore an independent company random testing pool. The company has 100 drivers and 100 participants. For an FMCSA-regulated company with 100 drivers, 50 drivers must be tested for drugs each year and 10 must be tested for alcohol. Any company with 2 or more security-sensitive employees can use a standalone pool, but a federated pool is highly recommended if the company has 8 or fewer employees.

Consortium Pool - This involves a group of corporate participants forming a consortium or group pool. Owner operators and other companies with only one security-sensitive position must join the affiliate pool. The pool may consist of 50 participants as follows:

During the year, the alliance pool may select participants from companies A, C, E, G, and I for testing. As long as the consortium meets its requirements, the other companies B, D, F, and H still meet the requirement percentages and follow all other rules and regulations required by the DOT random testing program.

In order to obtain a compliant DOT random testing program, a few items need to be reviewed:

Regardless of job title such as supervisor, volunteer, contractor, owner-operator, etc., people are selected for testing based on their job function (known as a security-sensitive function) rather than their job title.

Everyone in the pool must have an equal opportunity to be selected and tested during each selection period.

Employees must be selected for testing using scientifically valid methods, which may include: use of random number tables, computer-based random number generators traceable to specific employees

Testing must be unpredictable and unannounced, and distributed evenly throughout the year.

Some people will be picked more than once, it's really random.

Once notified of random selection, employees must report for random testing immediately.

The use of substitutes is not DOT compliant.