The VOE Shake‑Up: Why Tenstreet’s Move is a Wake‑Up Call for Trucking
- Kameel Gaines
- Aug 7
- 4 min read
The Spark That Lit Up My Feed
Last week, something happened in trucking that had everybody talking. And I do mean everybody: recruiters, safety managers, and fleet owners. My LinkedIn feed turned into a full‑on town hall, my DMs were blowing up, and the conversation was anything but quiet.
The cause? Tenstreet, the largest driver application platform in the trucking industry, announced that carriers will now be able to charge each other a fee for verifications of employment (VOEs) through the Tenstreet Exchange.
If you’ve never dealt with a VOE, here’s the quick version: it’s the backbone of responsible hiring. It’s how we confirm a driver’s work history, safety record, and qualifications before they ever touch your freight. When VOEs are delayed, incomplete, or withheld, recruiting grinds to a halt. Drivers get frustrated. Safety gets compromised. And retention? You might lose a driver before they even start.
So when this announcement dropped, the industry had opinions.
Lots of them.
Why This Isn’t Just Another Industry Headline
VOEs aren’t just an HR form.
They touch every pillar of a fleet’s success:
Recruitment—Delays can kill a hire.
Retention—Trust can erode before a driver ever rolls out.
Safety—Rushing onboarding or skipping verifications can lead to costly, dangerous mistakes.
In other words, the switch wasn’t just another vendor change. This was a change with ripple effects, one that forced everyone to take a hard look at how we operate.
Tenstreet’s Move —The Part Most People Don’t Know
The easy take was to point the finger at Tenstreet.But here’s the inside story most don’t know, and I can say this because I have a trusted source inside the company.
Tenstreet resisted this move for as long as possible. They said it publicly at their conference earlier this year: they didn’t want to do it. But carriers were leaving their platform because they wanted the ability to charge for VOEs. When you’re the largest player in the game and your customers start walking away, you have two choices:
Hold your ground and watch your market share erode.
Adapt to what the market is demanding.
They adapted. Not because they wanted to profit from VOEs, but because FMCSA has left this space wide open for carriers to exploit. And no private company can fix a systemic problem that regulators have failed to address.
The Industry Reaction – And What It Reveals
The moment Matthew Zarras, VP at Dart Network, posted about the announcement, it was like throwing a match onto dry grass. The comment section exploded, recruiters, fleet owners, safety managers, and even drivers chimed in.
Common themes emerged:
Frustration over fees ranging from $6.95 to $49.95, with some over $100.
Fears of retaliation pricing, where competitors are charged more simply because they can.
Concern that delays would worsen, with some carriers already taking the full 30 days allowed.
The pattern was clear: this change didn’t create bad behavior; it just exposed and amplified what was already happening.
Where the Real Problem Lives
This isn’t about Tenstreet. It’s about the FMCSA’s failure to create a standardized, centralized VOE system, the same way they did with the Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse.
Other transportation sectors have this problem figured out. In aviation, rail, and maritime, there are central databases with uniform fees and timelines. They don’t turn verification into a competitive weapon. But in trucking, we still have a patchwork process full of faxes, follow‑up calls, and arbitrary fees.
How VOEs Hit Recruitment, Retention, and Safety
This is where it gets real. From the outside, VOEs might look like paperwork. From the inside, they’re make‑or‑break.
Recruitment: A recruiter I know had a perfect candidate, with a clean MVR, solid work history, and culture fit. One VOE came back in 24 hours. The other? Silence. After days of calls, emails, and faxes, the driver took a job elsewhere. The delay killed the deal.
Retention: A driver accepts an offer, turns in his truck, and waits… and waits. By the time VOEs clear, trust is already cracked. If onboarding starts with delays and frustration, retention odds drop fast.
Safety: One carrier waited nearly a month for a VOE, rushed the driver through orientation, and put them on the road. Weeks later, that driver had a rollover in bad weather. The VOE, when it finally arrived, revealed two similar preventable incidents in the past.
The FMCSA Blueprint
The solution isn’t complicated; the FMCSA already has the model in place.
The Clearinghouse works because:
There’s one database.
There’s one flat, regulated fee.
There’s one timeline that applies to everyone.
Apply that same framework to VOEs, and you eliminate retaliation, speed up hiring, protect retention, and close safety gaps. It’s not about government overreach; it’s about fixing a system we’ve proven we can’t self‑regulate fairly.
Stop Weaponizing VOEs
While we wait for FMCSA to act, we have choices to make as an industry. We can stop turning VOEs into a profit war. We can choose speed and transparency over gamesmanship. We can compete on service, safety, and driver experience, not on who can stall a competitor the longest.
Because here’s the truth: Every time we use VOEs as a weapon, we:
Slow down the hiring process.
Lose good drivers to faster‑moving fleets.
Increase turnover before a driver even starts.
Risk public safety.
No one outside trucking is making us act this way. This is self‑inflicted.
Your Move
This is a leadership moment. Carriers, recruiters, safety directors, and drivers, we all have a stake in fixing this.
Speak up in your associations. Challenge your own VOE practices. Support standardization.
And if you want the full breakdown, with real‑world examples, industry voices, and the unfiltered truth about where this is heading, listen to the latest episode of The Rig on Wheels Show
Because at the end of the day, it’s not about paperwork.
It’s about protecting the profession we all rely on and building an industry worth leading into the future.
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