Everything this chapter has described used to stop at the employer who found it. The Clearinghouse is the database that ends that, and § 382.701 makes consulting it a condition of hiring rather than an option. An employer must not employ a driver subject to this part to perform a safety-sensitive function without first running a pre-employment query for a verified positive, adulterated or substituted controlled substances test result; an alcohol confirmation test at 0.04 or higher; a refusal in violation of § 382.211; or an employer’s report of actual knowledge of on-duty, pre-duty or post-accident alcohol use, or controlled substance use. That is the FULL query, and it requires the driver’s specific consent. Employers must also query at least once a year for every covered employee, and here a LIMITED query is allowed instead: it tells the employer only whether information exists, without releasing it. If it does exist, the employer has 24 hours to run a full query — and if it does not, the driver may not continue in any safety-sensitive function until the full query is run and comes back with no prohibitions.

The driver stands in the middle of every one of those queries, and § 382.703 is the reason. No employer may query the Clearinghouse about a particular driver without first obtaining that driver’s written or electronic consent, retained for 3 years from the last query, and before an employer may access the record itself the driver must submit electronic consent through the Clearinghouse for the specific categories the section lists — which include not only the violations but the substance abuse professional’s report of successful completion, the negative return-to-duty test, and the employer’s report that follow-up testing is done. The catch is in § 382.703(c), and it is worth reading twice: no employer may permit a driver to perform a safety-sensitive function if the driver refuses to give that consent. Consent is genuinely the driver’s to give, and withholding it costs the work rather than hiding the record.

Two provisions matter most to a driver with something in the file. § 382.709 gives access in the other direction: a driver may review information in the Clearinghouse about themselves, except as otherwise restricted by law or regulation, and must register with the Clearinghouse before doing so — which is the only way to know what an employer will see before they see it. And § 382.719 sets out when a violation stops being visible, on four conditions that must ALL be met: the substance abuse professional has reported the required information, the employer has reported a negative return-to-duty test, the driver’s current employer has reported successful completion of every follow-up test prescribed in the report, and five years have passed since the date of the violation determination. Until all four are satisfied the information remains available to employers querying the database. Completing the return-to-duty process therefore does not clear the record; it starts the clock on it.