The Consortium/Third Party Administrator should be the Designated Employer Representative’s strongest ally in ensuring compliance. But the C/TPA can only do their job when the DER does their part in keeping employee lists updated. This is so critical to our duties that TSS has included instructions in its DER Handbook:
Employee Lists
Provide an employee list quarterly. Make sure you indicate name, employee ID# or last 4 of their SSN, complete name and what modal agency they are in (FMCSA, USCG, etc.). Notify TSS of terminations as soon as possible.
Send employees for tests with a complete (filled out) referral form.
All U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) modal agencies require a pre-employment negative test to enter an employee into the consortium. Once that result is received, the employee is eligible to be in the consortium and is then subject to random testing.
As the DER, you are responsible for sending the employee for testing, ensuring that the test is received and is correct (name, reason for test, modal agency, etc.), and that the employee is added to the random testing pool.
Anytime you terminate an employee, you must let the consortium manager know that the employee is no longer with your company. The sooner the better, so that the former employee is not chosen in a random selection. It is prudent to send an updated list of employees to your consortium manager a few weeks before the upcoming quarter. You should also request an official copy of the entity report from the consortium manager to verify the list’s accuracy.
Having an up-to-date, clean pool reduces the need to choose alternates for randoms and is favorable for auditing purposes in the future.