Free Driver Investigation History File

No — it is a second, separate file. The driver qualification file under 49 CFR 391.51 holds the application, the MVR, the medical certificate and the annual review note. The driver investigation history file under 391.53 holds only the safety performance history investigation from 391.23(d) and (e), and 391.53(a) requires it be kept in a secure location with controlled access because of what is in it. Carriers that merge the two usually end up with drug-and-alcohol responses sitting in a file their insurer can read, which 391.53(a)(1) does not permit.

391.23(c)(1) sets 30 days from the date the driver's employment begins — not from the application, and not from when the previous employer eventually replies. If a previous employer has not responded by then, what goes in the file is your documented good-faith effort to reach them. Any time taken up by the driver exercising their review or rebuttal rights is explicitly separate from that 30 days and does not extend it.

391.53(c) requires the safety performance histories received for a driver who is hired be retained for as long as that driver is employed by the carrier, and for three years after that. That is an open-ended clock rather than a fixed term — a twenty-year driver's file is retained for twenty-three years.

Then you document the attempts. 391.23(c)(2) requires a written record of each previous employer contacted or of the good-faith efforts to do so, and failures — either to reach them or of them to supply the history — must be documented. 391.23(c)(3) also points you at the § 386.12 complaint procedure for reporting a non-responding employer to FMCSA, and says to keep a copy of that report in this file as part of the good-faith evidence.

You still open the file. 391.23(c)(4) requires documentation that no investigation was possible to be placed in the driver investigation history file within the same 30 days. An empty file is a finding; a file containing a dated note that there was no DOT-regulated employment in the preceding three years is not.

Only partly, and only for some of them. Since 6 January 2023, employers subject to § 382.701(a) must use the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse to meet the 391.23(e) inquiry with respect to FMCSA-regulated employers. It does not cover employers regulated by another DOT mode — 391.23(e)(4)(ii) requires those be asked directly — and where an applicant subject to follow-up testing has not completed all of it, 391.23(e)(4)(i) requires requesting the follow-up testing plan from the previous employer.