It's been an eventful 10 months for drive-away operator and 30-plus year trucking veteran Evelyn Hickey, who as is somewhat common for contractors in the niche normally works with several different carriers over the course of any given year.
As such, Evelyn Hickey takes a lot of drug tests.
Between February and July of 2025, she guesses she took about 10, in fact, between pre-employment drug screens required by new-to-her carriers, randoms, and one required post-accident test after a passenger car up ahead jumped into her lane in rush-hour traffic in California. You might guess what happened next.
Between "me and the anti-collision" system in the truck, Hickey said, "the brakes locked and I slid into the person. I just couldn't stop" fast enough.
No one was injured, and the post-accident drug screen begun later that day would come back negative, as always for Hickey.
Evelyn Hickey
Heinen and company had "verified" one of Hickey's pre-employment urine samples as "adulterated," noting on her Clearinghouse profile a pH level well below what is standard for human urine. Such a result shows up on the Clearinghouse in the "refusal to test" violation category. Hickey has no idea how the result happened, whether there was a mix-up in the handling of samples and her paperwork was associated with someone else's urine, or some other mishap.
What is 100% clear, though, is that the MRO violated federal regulations by reporting that result to the Clearinghouse more than two months after apparent verification, putting Hickey in what you might call Drug and Alcohol "Clearinghouse jail."
The ramifications for her work prospects have been huge, among other impacts:
- To get out of prohibited status, she had to spend $500 to enter a program with a Substance Abuse Professional (SAP), as required by regulation.
- The SAP put her on a program of follow-up testing, requiring six tests over the course of the next 12 months.
- Every carrier she'd worked with previously kicked her to the curb by policy, until the fact of the past SAP requirement falls off her Clearinghouse profile. The SAP scarlet letters won't drop off her profile for five years, even after she completes follow-up tests with no other adverse results.
Until then, she's reduced to working with carriers who advertise themselves as "SAP friendly," open to Clearinghouse-jailed drivers. "I'm going broke with them," she said of one carrier whose settlements come chockful of chargebacks and whom she calls "crooks," simply put.
Her story illustrates shortcomings of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's test Clearinghouse system and the drug testing/medical review industry on which it relies.
It might be relatively simple to get a wrongly-assigned crash removed from your record via the FMCSA's DataQs system if your company wasn't involved. Not so a driver's reported "refusal to test," even when the MRO who reported it clearly violated regulation in the process.
The facts of Hickey's case
The MRO's violation is memorialized in the reported result, shown here in Hickey's profile entered in the Clearinghouse more than two months after the date of the verified result. Regulations require reporting of verified results within two business days. Heinen Medical MRO Services did not respond to Overdrive's repeated attempts to contact the company with questions about the case.
FMCSA has known about the MRO's violation at least for the more than six months following Evelyn Hickey's DataQs request for review of the result.
The day after her post-crash test, March 28, she was at a Concentra clinic in West Sacramento providing yet another urine sample for a pre-employment screening ordered by Quality Drive-Away of Goshen, Indiana. Hickey was hopeful to expand her work there moving "RVs, trucks, you name it," she said.
She gave that sample, but the clinic called her shortly thereafter noting a fatal flaw with it. That is, "they spilled the sample," she said, and the clinic set up her for another for April 2 when she'd be back in the area.
Here, what could have simply been a comedy of errors turned tragic. This second sample left the Concentra location that same day via FedEx "priority overnight" shipping. Yet it wouldn't reach its final testing destination, the Alere (now Abbott) Toxicology Services lab all the way across the country in Gretna, Louisiana, for five full days.
Tracking information from FedEx shows delivery April 7, and according to Hickey, FedEx reps described its journey across the country as including extended stops in Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, before the final destination.
There is no time limit in federal regulations for urine samples to be tested, yet Matt Glielmi, the National Association of Small Trucking Companies' drug and alcohol program administrator, notes five days is certainly "outside the norm."
Speaking during ongoing, well-publicized flight delays during last fall's government shutdown, Glielmi noted "considerable delays" with the airlines at the time. At once, "is that delay going to in any way affect the integrity of the testing process?" Glielmi said no, though more time in transit could increase the chances of a custody and control mix-up.
Jessica Piscia, a carrier compliance professional headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, who assisted Hickey with her DataQs filing, noted sample collections are "supposed to be unidentifiable" with respect to the identity of the person who gave it, later matched up with the Custody and Control Form to prevent the chances of tampering.
Piscia's seen custody forms lost, samples mislabeled. Today, she said, she has all the drivers she works with "send me a picture of the chain of custody form," she said. She sends those to the company she uses to manage testing and review as a backstop against potential sampling mismatches.
More time in transit, more opportunity for mistakes.
Hickey is convinced the "adulterated" result problem with her sample has to do with that time. After reviewing the results post-testing, a representative from the MRO appears to have done what it was supposed to do in contacting Hickey directly to determine if there was a medical reason for the low pH level. Hickey said she answered their questions as best she could, but did not take the offer to use a different testing lab to test the split part of the urine sample all labs are required to reserve per federal regulations.
[Related: Drug and alcohol regs are tighter than most know: Trucking Law]
Testing the split sample elsewhere might be the best way for a driver in a similar situation to uncover evidence of a problem with the lab's test itself, according to NASTC's Matt Glielmi.
"The donor does always have that option," said Glielmi, and the "MRO should explain that relatively clearly to the donor. Some companies will put that cost on to the donor, and it might take a couple weeks."
Hickey was aware of time and cost involved, she noted, and did not order the split test for those reasons, in addition to something of a gut feeling that the problem must have been with sample degradation over time before the test.
Or a custody mismatch somewhere along the chain, as the case may be.
As you can see in the image above from her Clearinghouse, the "verified result" of an adulterated specimen was achieved by the Heinen company on April 11, 2025, nine days after the April 2 sample collection began the process. Hickey was aware of the problem with the test by then, as was the carrier who ordered it, yet both were in a holding pattern on her contract to begin work with Quality Drive-Away, given the result wasn't appearing in the Clearinghouse.
Meantime, more pre-employment tests came back, including another ordered by Quality Drive-Away itself and handled by the same lab and MRO. Result? Negative, verified on June 18, 2025, by Heinen. A week later, more than two months after the verified adulterated test results, in direct contradiction to the regulatory time limit of two days, the MRO reported the ealier "refusal to test" to the Clearinghouse and Hickey's profile, and she was officially prohibited to drive.
What's a driver in 'Clearinghouse jail' to do?
Overdrive's covered the indignity of the Return to Duty process for truckers who find themselves there and aren't illegal-substance abusers or alcoholics in the common sense of those terms, memorably in this story about longtime trucker Sandra Jeanne Irwin's experience with use of a therapeutic CBD product and subsequent positive test for marijuana.
[Related: CBD horror story: The indignity of 'Return to Duty' and the Substance Abuse Professional program]
After the "refusal to test" report from the MRO, Hickey wouldn't get signed on with Quality Drive-Away, and at a loss for ways to challenge the test, she paid her $500 and entered an SAP program, as required by the Return to Duty regulations. Given she clearly wasn't an addict or alcoholic, she noted, the SAP gave her the relatively short one-year follow-up testing regime to satisfy the Return to Duty process.
But as time went on, her work limitations as well as the MRO's violation became clear, and the entire experience left a sour taste.
It was a pre-employment test -- she well knew she was going to be taking it. "I have no reason to water down my urine," she said of the "adulterated" result. "I want the SAP completely removed" from the record, "and my money back. Basically, it’s a defamation of character -- they have branded me a 'drug addict.'"
[Related: How to challenge erroneous violation and crash data: FMCSA's DataQs system]
Her DataQs filing had been met with no official response from FMCSA for months when Overdrive first queried the agency in late October after learning of Hickey's story.
The agency didn't respond to Overdrive before close to the end of November, when a public affairs officer said FMCSA's "Special Investigation Unit has escalated the matter. The investigation is still ongoing."
Since then, Hickey said she'd talked to an investigator, but nothing has been done.
Her DataQs filing remains unresolved.
With clear evidence of the MRO's violation, at once, Hickey was advised by FMCSA customer service in December to file an MRO-related complaint in FMCSA's National Consumer Complaint Database, whose 2025 overhaul made it more obvious that complaints about MROs are part of its purpose.
[Related: FMCSA makes it easier to call out bad brokers after National Consumer Complaint Database update]
After she filed the complaint, she was told that the agency would escalate the matter. Two weeks passed, and she was assured she would be getting a call within two more weeks. When that time passed without further contact, she reached out to the agency directly again, and again was reassured of escalation.
It doesn't feel like escalation to her, rather a runaround. "I can't get anyone to listen," she said.
"She’s fighting the government, and more often than not it feels like it will be a losing battle," said Jessica Piscia. The obvious violation of rules by the MRO she looked at as "selective enforcement, apparently," on FMCSA's part, a "triage situation. You fight the battle that you can win, or that is the most prevalent that you can address."
MROs gain authority to administer federally regulated testing programs from an entirely different department of the federal government than Transportation, where FMCSA is housed. MROs must abide by FMCSA's regulations and standards that apply to them, but thy're more generally governed under rules of the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS relies on a professional association and two other non-government entities to certify MROs to participate in federally regulated drug testing programs.
[Related: FMCSA administrator Barrs wants to end self-certification for ELDs, trainers, medical providers]
FMCSA did not respond to direct questions related to the agency's power to police the testing and MRO community. FMCSA was also quiet after direct queries as to the appropriate recourse option for a driver like Hickey with a complaint and evidence of a clear violation.
The agency well knows the ramifications of "refusal to test" reports to the Clearinghouse, some coming not for reasons of "adulterated" results but something as simple as a driver leaving the testing facility too early, for whatever reason. Then-FMCSA drug and alcohol chief Bryan Price, speaking at the Mid-America Trucking Show three years ago, noted a then-ongoing spike in refusal reports:
... the number of drivers who are reported to the Clearinghouse for a “refusal to test” has been climbing, and a number of drivers reported for a refusal just didn’t understand the rule.
“We’re trying to do as much as we can to educate the industry about what a refusal to test is,” Price said. “If a driver has a refusal reported, it’s the same consequence as testing positive.”
Price said he’s seen many reports in which drivers were selected for a random drug test and left the testing facility too early, resulting in a refusal to test report. That driver then has to go through the full return-to-duty process.
As Hickey's case makes clear, mistakes are made in the reporting process. For something as potentially career-staining/ending for a driver as the Clearinghouse jail, though, perfection should be the goal, many watchers feel. Drivers, and perhaps the agency itself, should have more recourse to hold all parties in the chain accountable.
The word perfection certainly doesn't describe what FMCSA and the medical community have achieved in Hickey's case.
"There’s not a lot of drivers that will stand on the principal," said Jessica Piscia. Hickey is "standing on the principal."
How many other pro drivers are in her situation? Piscia wondered. "I believe in fairness and equality, that everybody should get the same treatment. I’m sure she’s not alone."
