The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) on Thursday gave some relief to medical examiners and state licensing agencies struggling with implementation of a fully-electronic filing CDL medical exams.
In amending its existing 15-day waiver, FMCSA Thursday said it will allow carriers and CDL holders to continue using paper med certs for up to 60 days post-issuance. The waiver is effective until Oct. 12, 2025.
FMCSA's Medical Examiner’s Certification Integration (NRII) rule, which dates back a decade, was implemented in late June, requiring medical examiners to electronically transmit exam results to FMCSA by midnight of the next calendar day following an exam, and FMCSA will electronically transmit exam results to the state driver’s licensing agencies, where they would be posted to the Commercial Driver’s License Information System (CDLIS) driver motor vehicle record (MVR).
By mid-July, when the first waiver was granted, only 37 states were fully compliant with the new rule. Even states who managed to reach compliance experienced cumbersome growing pains, struggling to match and update the information across databases and leaving some state trucking associations to step in to help stitch it together manually.
North Carolina Trucking Associations President and CEO Ben Greenberg said his state's DMV in late July was matching renewals based on name and date of birth as opposed driver’s license number, adding if there wasn’t a case-sensitive match, renewals ended up in “renewal purgatory.”
Twelve states are still non-compliant: Alaska, California, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Wyoming.
