Vandalia Bus Lines Finishes DOT Audit 2 Days Early With DriverHub

When the words "DOT audit" appear in your inbox, the room gets quieter, the to-do list gets longer, and sleep gets shorter.

For Vandalia Bus Lines, that dreadful DOT audit notice arrived and was scheduled for four days. Johnny Sullivan, Safety Director would be the one sitting across from the auditor.

But because Vandalia Bus Lines had recently onboarded with DriverHub, the auditor finished the four-day audit after just one and a half days.

Challenge Faced

When Johnny Sullivan joined Vandalia as the Safety Director, he inherited a DQ file mess from his predecessor. Anything with a driver's name on it, including doctor's notes, miscellaneous forms and MVRs from years back, had been pushed into the DQ regardless of where it truly belonged. Files were hard to navigate and old data wasn't being purged.

"It was tedious because at one point, they were really just shoving anything into the DQ,” said Johnny Sullivan, Safety Director of Vandalia Bus Lines. “Anything that should have been in the personnel folder — doctor's notes, all kinds of anything they were coming across — they were just shoving it."

The Turning Point

Johnny initially cleaned up the paper files manually, then tried going digital with Google Docs and other ad-hoc tools. Every attempt felt even more tedious than just printing hard copies.

Johnny said, "Initially when we tried to go digital, it was more tedious than if we were just printing it out, and I said forget this. I'm just going to keep printing it out and do it the old school way."

Vandalia runs MVRs twice a year per driver across each of its 74 drivers. A single MVR update — printing, printing the annual review, hole-punching, and filing — was a 30-minute ritual. The burden of recurring tasks was punishing and a solution was critically needed.

Vandalia learned of the DriverHub solution from a peer reference through the International Motorcoach Group, and onboarded with DriverHub in May 2025.

Solutions & Strategy

The DOT audit landed a few months later. Johnny set up a DriverHub login for the auditor with restricted access — only the specific drivers and records the auditor had requested — and watched the Avatar training video on auditor access the morning of the visit.

The auditor was impressed immediately. He clicked through driver records of duty status, jumped to DQ files, cross-checked dates against pre-employment records, and verified everything was in sequence without sifting through paper.

Johnny said, "I was a bit nervous if the auditor was going to be receptive to DriverHub or not, because he's kind of an old school guy. But he really liked it. It was really easy for him to cross check."

Outstanding Results

DriverHub didn't just help Vandalia pass an audit, it changed and improved Johnny's relationship with compliance.

• Audit Wrapped Up 2 Days Early: A four-day DOT audit ended in 1.5 days, saving Johnny and the team time, stress and preparation.
• MVR Updates Went From 30 Minutes to Five: A 30-minute ritual of printing, hole-punching, and filing every motor vehicle record is now a five-minute task.
• Compliance Confidence Replaces Audit Anxiety: Built-in automated expiration alerts and a centralized dashboard helps Johnny's team is stay on top of every clearinghouse query, license renewal, and med card without hunting across systems. The next audit isn't a panic event.

"I was skeptical at first, but [DriverHub] has honestly been a godsend for us."

— Johnny Sullivan, Safety Director, Vandalia Bus Lines

If your fleet is also overwhelmed with paper files and dreading the next DOT audit, book a DriverHub demo today