By: David Perlman, BA, NCAC II, SUDP, EAP
Aftercare Requirements
When is the Substance Abuse Professional’s process completed? SAP responsibilities are fulfilled when he completes his follow-up evaluation. In many cases, the SAP will include an aftercare requirement for additional treatment or sober support meetings. If the SAP includes these, they are not recommendations, they are requirements. An auditor may ask for proof that an employee completed all aftercare requirements. If these requirements were not done, the employee and the employer may be considered out of compliance and may be censured to include possible fines.
What are your options? The employer’s Designated Employer Representative (DER) may receive reports directly from the treatment provider or require submission of attendance slips from sober support meetings, putting one more requirement on the DER. Reports sent from a treatment provider can result in information that needs to be redacted from the employee’s file, interpreted for the DER (too much clinical-speak) or may require consequences beyond the scope of DOT requirements. What do you do if the treatment provider reports several unexcused absences or attends less than the required sober support meetings? Does the DER need to learn about being a counselor or must they have repeated calls to the treatment provider?
The other option is to have this monitored by your Employee Assistance Program, if you have one. Or, to have the SAP monitor the aftercare requirement. With these options, the DER gets a task removed from their desk. The EAP/SAP handles all violations with the treatment provider and would only bring these to the DER for cases of gross non-compliance that would violate any return-to-work agreement. In the absence of treatment violations, the EAP/SAP would only notify the DER of the successful completion of all Aftercare requirements… Case closed.
When developing your SAP referral list, this issue should be addressed. SAPs are not required to monitor aftercare, and many of them do not. If the SAP elects to do this, they should be documenting their future efforts as a non-DOT function and should be completing non-DOT disclosures and releases. Will your SAP provide this service? Is this service included in his initial fee, or is it additional?
Follow-up Testing
If it is your employee who had a violation, you must give them a Return to Duty test (RTD) and then implement the Follow-up Testing plan directed by the SAP. Again, it is not a recommendation, it is a requirement. If the employee is under FMCSA, the RTD results must be entered into the FMCSA Clearinghouse under your company’s account.
If the employee had their violation with a prior employer, you need the SAP reports with the Follow-up Testing Plan. The plan follows the employee. Also, you need proof of the RTD test and any Follow-up Tests that were administered. When the SAP requires X number of tests for X number of years, it is not a calendar year. It is a working year in a DOT safety-sensitive position. If the employee had a break in service, you need to restart their plan from the date of the last test. The SAP reports can be obtained directly from the SAP or from the previous employer. Copies of the RTD and Follow-up tests can be obtained from the previous employer. Sometimes it does become an accounting problem for the employee who comes to you after having had four employers in three years with a full 5-year testing plan. In that case you may have to contact multiple employers. An auditor will expect documentation of these tests. Previous employers do make mistakes and some even don’t test. Copies of prior tests meet the gold standard.
If these test records are not available, you are placing yourself in jeopardy by putting a new employee into a safety-sensitive position. Your options are to delay their start date until the records are received or the employee will need to restart his testing program from the last period that the testing plan was intact.
I tell all my clients that they should keep records on all their testing. The copy of the testing Custody and Control Form that the donor gets clearly says “Donor Copy”. I routinely ask new clients for their copy to get the Specimen ID Number, correct test date and the Medical Review Officer’s name. . They often say they had to turn it in to their dispatcher or other company representative. The DER will get confirmation of the test and there is a copy for the ‘employer’. I have had former clients call me for assistance because their former employer failed to send requested testing information to their new employer, or worse, their former employer went out of business, and no one had access to records. Remember Yellow (truck lines) going out of business in 2023? For my clients who remembered to keep their CCF’s, I have been able to get copies sent to their prospective employer. Let them keep their copy.
There have been a recent number of errors in posting results in the Clearinghouse for some FMCSA cases. Some DER’s have thought they were supposed to enter results of Follow-up testing for each individual test. This resulted in the Clearinghouse listing this as Step 6 completed- Case closed. Follow-up testing is reported to the Clearinghouse only when the LAST test is completed and reported. If a query reports that Follow-up Testing was completed and the violation and the RTD test are only six months old, this is a major red flag.
David Perlman is a US DOT Qualified Substance Professional in private practice serving Washington State since 2005 and may be contacted at david@dotsap.net or (425) 478-0152.
