When FMCSA's Own Data Says a Safe Carrier Is Uninsured: The Motus Rollout Problem

What Motus Is

Motus is FMCSA's replacement for the Unified Registration System. It consolidates USDOT registration, operating-authority applications, biennial (MCS-150) updates, and related filings into a single Login.gov dashboard. FMCSA announced it through a Federal Register notice on April 29, 2026, launched the platform on May 14, and opened it to all new and existing registrants on May 19.

The cutover did two things at once. It changed how carriers file, and it changed where FMCSA's public data comes from. Both sides have been bumpy, and the second one is the part most brokers haven't heard about.

The Errors Carriers Are Reporting

Trade press and FMCSA's own help portal have documented a consistent set of problems since launch:

• Erroneous involuntary suspension. A carrier's authority gets marked "involuntary suspension" with the reason listed as "no active insurance meeting minimum coverage on file" — while the required policy is visibly active right next to that notice in the same system.
• Insurance filings that don't appear. The insurer files the BMC-91/91X, the carrier can see it as active in its own Motus account, and it still doesn't surface on the public record — which blocks operating authority from activating.
• Agent or policy changes triggering a suspension notice. Switching insurance agents, or replacing one policy with another after shopping coverage, has set off an inadvertent involuntary-suspension flag even though coverage never lapsed.
• Authority status simply wrong. Active carriers showing as inactive, and — less commonly reported but more dangerous — the reverse.
• Accounts stuck as "Transportation Service Providers." Carriers inadvertently registered as TSPs can't claim their USDOT record, which blocks MCS-150 updates entirely.
• Lockouts and verification failures. "Unauthorized Access" messages, Login.gov email mismatches with the old FMCSA account, and failed government-ID / facial-verification steps that leave the company official unable to get in.
• Incomplete MCS-150 migrations. Biennial updates submitted around the cutover that didn't fully process.

Why This Reaches Brokers, Not Just Carriers

Every carrier-vetting tool — FreightWatch included — is built on FMCSA's public data: the Company Snapshot, SAFER, the QCMobile API, and the bulk datasets on data.transportation.gov. When Motus went live, the legacy datasets stopped receiving new activity and a parallel set of Motus-native datasets started publishing in their place. That handoff introduced a failure mode nobody was watching for: the new feeds can silently omit entire carriers that exist and are in good standing inside Motus. Not a blank insurance field — the carrier is just absent from that slice of the export, so every public surface that reads it renders the same wrong picture at once, with no error to catch.

One independent analysis, published by fleetfax in mid-2026, put rough numbers on it. Of about 9,849 carriers that appeared insurance-lapsed in the public data, the author spot-checked a sample against Motus directly and found roughly 5.5% — 541 carriers — were actually insured, just missing from the export. A documented case in the same writeup involved a liability filing received in early June that was confirmed in the carrier's Motus account but still absent from the legacy datasets, the Motus-native datasets, and the QCMobile API five weeks later. These are one analyst's figures, not an FMCSA count, but the trade reporting from Overdrive and Land Line describes the same pattern from the carrier side.

The risk runs both directions. An insured carrier reading as uninsured is a nuisance that a careful broker catches by double-checking. The opposite — coverage that has actually been cancelled still showing as active because the update didn't propagate — is the one that costs someone a claim. That direction is less reported so far, but the same broken plumbing allows it.

What FMCSA Has Done

FMCSA has temporarily suspended the inactivation of USDOT numbers for any entity that hasn't completed its required biennial update since June 1, 2026, and has told registrants not to worry about inactivation caused by Motus-related access or system issues. The agency says it is prioritizing insurance and authority fixes and has extended its registration contact-center hours during the transition.

Carriers who believe their status is wrong should contact FMCSA rather than wait it out:

• Registration contact center: 1-800-832-5660 (extended hours reported as roughly 8:00 AM – 11:00 PM ET, weekdays and Saturdays)
• Support tickets: ask.fmcsa.dot.gov
• New registration system email: NewRegSys@dot.gov

One thing FMCSA and every trade outlet agree carriers should not do: pull a second USDOT or MC number as a workaround. That triggers duplicate-registration, insurance-fraud, and chameleon-carrier red flags that are far harder to unwind than a transition-period status error.

How to Vet Carriers While This Settles

• Treat a sudden "inactive authority" or "no insurance on file" on an otherwise-clean, established carrier as unconfirmed, not disqualifying — check when the flag appeared.
• Ask the carrier for a current certificate of insurance and proof the BMC-91/91X was filed, then confirm coverage with the insurer or agent directly rather than relying on the public record alone.
• Don't offboard a carrier you've worked with for months on a single data-surface flag with no other change around it.
• On high-value or high-liability loads, verify active coverage independently even when the public record shows a clean green status — the transition can hide a real lapse as easily as it invents a fake one.
• Keep vetting screenshots and COIs on file. If a load goes wrong, "the FMCSA record was unreliable that week" is not a defense you want to build from memory.

Where FreightWatch Fits In

FreightWatch stores a full snapshot of every carrier's FMCSA record on a regular sync and diffs each new pull against the last one. So when an insurance filing drops off a carrier's record or an authority status flips, it shows up as a dated change event — not a silent value that was always there. During the Motus transition, that history is the tell: a carrier whose insurance "disappeared" the same week its status flipped, with nothing else changing, looks a lot more like a feed artifact than a real lapse. A carrier whose coverage lapsed months ago and never came back is a different story.

This is the same data-quality problem we've written about before from other angles — why an old "Satisfactory" safety rating can be nearly meaningless, and why "unrated" doesn't mean "cleared." The FMCSA record is the right starting point for carrier vetting. It just isn't the whole answer, and right now it's noisier than usual. Change alerts help you tell a real shift from a transition-period glitch.

If you spot a carrier whose FMCSA record looks wrong right now — insurance missing that you know is in place, an authority status that flipped for no reason, an entity that's dropped out of search entirely — let us know and we'll check it against what we have. If it's your own carrier's record that's wrong, report it straight to FMCSA — submit a ticket through the Ask FMCSA portal, which is the fastest path to a fix.