DOT sued over supporting documents definition The American Trucking Associations has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to compel the U.S. Department of Transportation to complete a long-delayed rulemaking that would define supporting documents. In 1994, Congress directed the department to begin a rulemaking that would designate the number, type and frequency of supporting documents required to verify drivers’ hours-of-service records, and to ensure that such retention would be at a reasonable cost to truckers. In December 2008, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, an agency of the DOT, issued an internal memo announcing a policy change on access to electronic records as a form of supporting document. Essentially, the policy said that if investigators asked for global positioning system records, the carrier must furnish the records. Many carriers had been purging the records weekly, or allowing their service providers to purge them.               return