DOT Audit Readiness Checklist

The problem this kills

The letter arrives, or the auditor calls, and your stomach drops. A DOT compliance review (or a new-entrant audit, or a focused investigation) means someone is about to ask for your driver qualification files, your drug and alcohol program records, your hours-of-service supporting documents, your vehicle maintenance files, and your accident register - and they want them organized, complete, and current. Right now those documents live in a filing cabinet, three shared drives, a couple of inboxes, and the head of the safety manager who has been here longest. You spend the next two weeks in a panic, pulling files, finding the medical card that expired, discovering a driver's MVR was never re-run, and praying nothing is missing when the auditor sits down.

The worst part isn't the work - it's the not knowing. You can't say how ready you are until you're already digging. You don't know which category has the holes until you open it. And there's no single moment where a responsible person looks at "driver qualification files" and says, yes, this category is complete and audit-ready - it just sort of happens, under pressure, file by file.

This tool replaces the panic with a checklist and a score. Every required document category, every item inside it, its status, its uploads, and a readiness number you can watch climb - plus a hard rule that compliance reviews and approves each category before the audit package is assembled. An audit request stops being a fire drill and becomes "open the tool, finish the open items, hit the score we already maintain."

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your safety and compliance team, that:

• Builds your audit checklist by category - driver qualification files, drug & alcohol program, hours-of-service, vehicle maintenance, accident register, and any others you add - with the specific document items inside each, deduped so the same item can't land twice.
• Lets your team track each item's status (missing, in progress, uploaded, under review, approved/audit-ready) and upload the supporting document straight onto the item, into secure Storage.
• Shows a live readiness score - overall and per category - so at any moment you know exactly how prepared you are and where the gaps are.
• Flags expirations and missing items (an expired medical card, a missing MVR, a maintenance record that's overdue) before the auditor finds them.
• Puts a hard review gate before assembly: compliance reviews each category and only then marks it audit-ready.
• Assembles the audit package - an organized, named, foldered document set by category - once everything is approved.
• Exports a readiness report and the document set in the columns and naming your auditor or internal system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool step by step, and every step ends with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your operation. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks what authority and operation you run (interstate or intrastate, FMCSA-regulated, passenger or property, hazmat), which document categories and items actually apply to you, how your driver files and records are named today, your fleet and driver counts, who is allowed to approve a category as audit-ready, your renewal and expiration rules, and your messiest edge cases - terminated drivers, leased owner-operators, items that don't apply, documents that expire mid-audit. It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a checklist shaped to your operation, not a generic template you have to fight.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model and the standard DOT categories.
• The full build: database, login with roles, the checklist builder with duplicate guards, document upload to secure Storage, expiration tracking, the live readiness score and gap view, reminder emails, the compliance review-and-approve gate by category, and the assembled audit package.
• The hard human-in-the-loop sign-off and the complete audit trail of every status change and approval.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to any TMS or compliance system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a regulated carrier needs:

• Login so only your safety and compliance team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see their own company's data - never another carrier's.
• A complete audit trail - every upload, status change, review, and category approval is logged with who and when. (Ironic and wonderful: your audit-prep tool keeps its own audit trail.)
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the tool tracks and scores, but a real person in compliance must review and approve each category as audit-ready; nothing is assembled into the package automatically.
• Duplicate guards so the same checklist item can't be added twice - the dedupe key is category + item.
• Files in secure Storage with RLS - driver files and records live behind access rules, served only to people allowed to see them.

Who it's for

Safety managers, compliance managers, DOT compliance specialists, and the ops/BPM folks at trucking and motor-carrier companies who own audit readiness - anyone who's lived through the two-week scramble and never wants to feel that unprepared again. You don't need to write code. You need your list of required categories and items, the documents you'll upload, and an afternoon.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.