Vetting a broker in four minutes

A load you do not get paid for costs more than an empty day. You have burned the fuel, the hours, the maintenance and the capacity you could have sold to someone else — and then you spend weeks chasing an invoice.

The checks below take about four minutes on a broker you have not worked with. Do them in this order, because each one is cheaper than the one after it. The broker-vetting checklist runs the same ground as a scored list; this piece is the why behind each check.

Look the broker up on FMCSA's SAFER company snapshot by USDOT or MC number. You are checking two things: that broker authority is listed as authorized, and how long the authority has existed. A carrier authority on the same USDOT number is not a broker authority — read which one is listed.

Check on the day you book, not only on the day you set the broker up. Authority can move from active to suspended within days: when a broker's bond is drawn below $75,000, FMCSA suspends the authority within 7 business days unless the bond is restored (§ 387.307).

A brand-new authority is not automatically a problem — everyone starts somewhere. But a new authority combined with an unusually good rate is the shape to slow down for, because the cheapest way to run a fraud is to stand up an entity, book freight aggressively, and disappear before the invoices come due.

Every property broker must keep $75,000 of financial security on file with FMCSA — a surety bond (Form BMC-84) or a trust fund (Form BMC-85) — and its registration stays in force only while that security does (§ 387.307). An active authority on SAFER is therefore also evidence that the security is in place.

What is public is the consequence of claims, not the claims themselves. A drawn-down bond shows up as a suspension. If a broker is declared in financial failure, FMCSA publishes a notice in the FMCSA Register, and claims against the bond are accepted for 60 days after that notice — which is the window a carrier owed money has to file.

Credit reporting and carrier-review services exist for exactly this. What matters is not the star rating but the days-to-pay figure and its consistency, held against the payment terms the broker is offering you.

A broker who reliably pays in forty days is easier to run a business against than one who usually pays in twenty and sometimes in ninety. Predictability is worth real money to a small fleet, because it is what lets you plan fuel and payroll without a factoring facility eating your margin.

If a payment is ever late or disputed, you have a right worth knowing: each party to a brokered transaction may review the broker's record of it, which must show what the broker was paid and when it paid the carrier (§ 371.3).

This is where double brokering and identity theft show up. A broker may only offer its services in the name its registration is issued in, and may not present itself as a carrier (§ 371.7) — so a name that does not match is not a clerical quirk. Check that these agree:

• The company name on the rate confirmation matches the name on the authority.
• The MC number on the rate con matches the one you looked up.
• The email domain matches the company's real domain, not a lookalike or a free mailbox.
• The phone number on the rate con matches the one in the public record, not just the one that called you.
• Payment details have not "recently changed" — a request to send payment somewhere new is covered in the double-brokering piece, linked below.

A rate well above the lane's normal range, offered to a carrier the broker has never used, on a load that must move immediately, is not good fortune. Urgency plus generosity plus an unfamiliar counterparty is the combination worth slowing down for.

This check costs nothing, and it works because fraud has to be attractive to work.

The reason carriers skip these checks is not ignorance. It is that the checks feel least necessary exactly when the pressure to book is highest — an empty truck, a Friday afternoon, a rate that solves the week.

Which is why it works better as a fixed routine than a case-by-case decision. Same five checks, every new broker, before the truck moves. The broker-vetting checklist keeps them as a scored list that saves in your browser.