The regulation does not ask you to hope your drivers comply. It requires you to monitor, to act immediately when they do not, and to write down what you did.
Key takeaways
Run a weekly review that reconciles every driver’s certified records against the supporting documents, and write down what you found and what you did about it. That is not a best practice borrowed from somewhere; it is close to a direct reading of the regulation. A motor carrier shall monitor the compliance of each driver, and a carrier that determines there has been non-compliance shall take immediate remedial action and record the dates on which the non-compliance occurred and the action taken.
There is a second, separate duty that carriers frequently miss: the carrier must verify the accuracy of the certified records of duty status forwarded by the driver according to the supporting documents provided, and require from the driver the changes necessary. The driver then accepts or rejects the changes, makes them, recertifies the record and forwards the amended record back. That two-way loop is the design. A carrier that silently edits logs has broken it.
Reconciliation only works if you know what you are reconciling against. The regulation defines supporting documents as electronic mobile communication records between driver and carrier through a call-in or fleet management system; payroll records, settlement sheets or equivalents indicating payments to the driver; government-issued documents indicating vehicle location; reports, receipts and documentation relating to the load, including bills of lading, itineraries and schedules showing origin and destination; documentation relating to servicing, repairing, fuelling, inspection or rental of the vehicle; and dispatch or trip records showing date, time or location during a trip, including arrival and departure times.
In other words: the fuel receipts, the dispatch messages, the settlement sheet and the bills of lading you already hold are the audit trail against which the logs are tested — by you first, or by an auditor later.
There is a defined chain of custody. A driver must forward the record of duty status and its supporting documents to the home terminal within 20 days of completing it, and the carrier must ensure they do. The carrier must then deposit those records at its principal place of business within 30 days of receiving them, and keep them in chronological order for each driver for at least 6 months after receipt.
Six months in chronological order per driver is a specific instruction. A shared drive of PDFs named by scan date does not meet it, and the moment an auditor asks for one driver’s consecutive weeks, the gap shows.
Never fix a log to make a violation disappear
The prohibition is broad: no carrier may request, require or allow any person to enter inaccurate information in a record of duty status or falsify, mutilate, obscure, alter, delete, destroy or deface the records or supporting documents. A driver caught with a falsified record faces a 72-hour out-of-service declaration that continues until the record is rectified. Correcting an error through the verification loop is compliance; rewriting history is an offence.
The British Columbia Safety Code division sets out what a monitoring programme actually has to produce. A carrier must monitor compliance for each driver and, on finding non-compliance, take immediate remedial action and issue a notice of non-compliance to the driver, record the date on which the non-compliance occurred, record the date the notice was issued, record the action taken, and require the driver to sign and date a document acknowledging receipt. Both documents must be retained at the principal place of business for 6 months from the date on which the non-compliance occurred.
If you operate in British Columbia, that is your obligation. If you operate elsewhere, it is still the clearest available description of what “we monitor our drivers” has to look like on paper — and it is the form an auditor anywhere would find persuasive.
At the carrier’s premises an inspector may require production of records of duty status and their supporting documents, records of driving time of an unidentified driver, the ELD information packet documents, the register of ELD malfunction or data diagnostic codes, any permits, and the record of non-compliance and remedial action. Note the last item: your own monitoring record is discoverable. A carrier with no such record has not merely failed to keep paperwork; it has evidence of not monitoring.
In Ontario the equivalent formal intervention is the facility audit, which the ministry describes as examining records related to driver qualifications, driver training, driver hours of service, driver behaviour, collision reporting and review, vehicle inspection, maintenance and repair, and any related supporting documents. The ministry adds that violations identified during an audit may result in charges being laid against the operator, a driver, or both, and the results may affect the CVOR record. Ontario also allows a carrier to request a voluntary facility audit to improve its safety rating — with the same warning about charges attached.
A 22-truck carrier reviews logs monthly, which in practice means someone opens the portal on the last Friday and skims. In one month the review surfaces three items: a driver with 40 minutes of unassigned driving on four separate days, a driver whose 16-hour elapsed limit was exceeded twice on the same customer’s dock, and a driver whose fuel receipts do not line up with two logged locations.
Monthly is too late for all three. The unassigned driving is a yard-move configuration problem that has been generating false segments for four weeks. The 16-hour breaches are a dock that holds trucks and a planner who does not know it. The receipt mismatch needed asking the driver while he could still remember the day.
Moved to weekly, the same review produces a different outcome: the yard-move setting is fixed after one week, the dock problem becomes a conversation with the customer about appointment windows rather than a pattern of violations, and the receipt discrepancy is resolved through the verification loop with an annotation the driver recertifies. Nothing about the fleet changed. The interval did.
A monitoring programme that never results in a consequence is not a monitoring programme, and one that results in an abrupt dismissal is a different kind of exposure. Document a proportionate process — Treadstone’s sister law firm sets out the reasoning in its note on progressive discipline in Ontario and why it matters before a termination. Where the evidence comes from cameras or telematics, the collection and use of that material has its own constraints; the firm covers those in workplace video surveillance in Ontario and in its answer on an employer’s privacy obligations for employee information.
This is the strongest use case in the whole compliance stack, because the work is high-volume, rule-bound and repetitive. Triaging a week of logs into an exception queue. Matching fuel and toll receipts to logged locations and flagging only the ones that disagree. Recalculating rolling cycle windows against tendered loads. Drafting the notice of non-compliance and the remedial-action note in the format your file needs.
What it must not do is decide. Whether a discrepancy is an error or a falsification, whether a driver is disciplined, and whether a log is amended are decisions a person makes, records and signs. And no automated process should ever be permitted to alter a certified record without the driver seeing and recertifying it — that is not a policy preference, it is how the regulation is built.
It sets a standard rather than an interval: monitor compliance, and take immediate remedial action on non-compliance. “Immediate” is hard to argue for something found six weeks later, which is why weekly is the practical floor.
You can require changes; you cannot impose them silently. The driver accepts or rejects the changes, makes the necessary changes, recertifies the record and forwards the amended record back.
At least 6 months after the day they are received, in chronological order for each driver, deposited at the principal place of business within 30 days of receipt.
Ontario escalates through disciplinary letters, interviews, audits, fleet size limitations, plate seizure, and suspension or cancellation of operating privileges, and an Unsatisfactory rating suspends or cancels operating privileges throughout Canada.
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