Additional Filings for your Trucking Company

Today we are talking with Reghan Orman about Annual Filings.

Reghan is Associate General Counsel at Apex Capital and she also leads the Apex Startup Program. A program designed to help those interested in starting a trucking company get their operating authority.

The trucking industry is one of the most regulated industries in the country. So every motor carrier is going to have lots of annual, biennial filings that they are going to need to keep up with. But first of all, is a filing related to your authority and that’s called the biennial update.

And that’s a form through the FMCSA that’s used essentially just to update contact information so things like your company’s address, phone numbers, things like that. And it can be done online through the FMCSA’s website through an MCSA-1 form. It’s free and it has to be filed every two years.

Your DOT number is going to help you determine when you need to file your biennial update, the month and the year, and all you have to do is look at the last two digits. The last digit will tell you the month, so if the last digit is a one, it’s January, it it’s two it’s February, all the way until if it’s a nine, that’s September and if it’s a zero, that’s October.

Then the second to last digit is going to tell you the year that you need to file in. So if it’s an odd digit, you’ll be filing in an odd-numbered year, if it’s an even digit, you’ll be filing in an even-numbered year.

Another filing that you need to keep up with that is related to your authority is the Annual Service of Process Agent Designation, which is also known as the BOC-3 form. Whenever a motor carrier initially applies for authority, they have file a BOC-3 form and that form basically designates a process agent in every state so that in case your company got sued in a different state, there would be somebody there to accept process and that’s called a blanket filing form. Typically motor carriers file the BOC-3 through a third-party company and that third-party company can help with the renewal every year. It typically is going to cost around one-hundred to two-hundred dollars and yes that’s an annual filing that the motor carrier needs to make.

Another annual filing that the motor carrier needs to keep in mind is the UCR Filing, that stands for Unified Carrier Registration. And this is a system among all the states that is used to register and collect fees annually from motor carriers who are engaged in interstate commerce. You can complete the UCR through your states’ Department of Transportation or Department of Motor Vehicles, whatever your base state calls it. The filing fee is going to depend on the number of trucks that the motor carrier has- so for zero to two trucks, it’s going to cost around seventy six dollars, from three to five trucks, it’s two-hundred and twenty seven and it just goes up from there and yes this form is an annual form.

Another annual form that needs to be filed by every single motor carrier is the International Registration Plan Filing, that’s the IRP. And what the IRP is a mechanism that is used to issue apportioned license plates to all motor carriers that are engaged in interstate commerce. Again, the IRP form is filed through your states’ Department of Transportation or Department of Motor Vehicles. When you first file it, there is an initial fee and then for every subsequent year, the filing fee is based upon the mileage that that motor carrier had for that year. This is also an annual form that must be filed.

IFTA is a filing that your motor carrier company needs to keep in mind. IFTA stands for the International Fuel Tax Agreement and if you’d like more information on calculating IFTA taxes, please see our IFTA video. But the system is used to appropriately apportion the fuel tax that a motor carrier has among each state that it travels in for that time period and the time period is quarterly. So IFTA taxes need to be filed every three months and they are filed through your states agency that’s in charge of processing fuel taxes.

The state that your motor carrier company is based out of probably also has some sort of annual filings that you need to keep up to date. It may be as simple as the biennial update where you are just updating your contact information or it might be a little more detailed so please see the state agency that you used to form your company on what type of filings it requires.

Finally, every motor carrier also is going to be subject to federal, state and local taxes. So if you’d like more information on how your motor carrier company is going to be taxed, please see our tax video.