Fleet Transport Inspection Guide

Three sources, one question

An audit at the premises is nothing like a roadside check. Nobody is looking at one driver on one day: three sources are laid side by side and compared.

• The tachograph files — driver card and vehicle unit.
• The working time records, which are a duty in their own right and not a copy of the tachograph.
• The employment documentation: who was engaged, over which dates, and what they were paid.

If the three agree, the visit ends quickly. If they diverge, the real work begins — and not on the examiner's side but on yours, because you are the one who has to explain the difference.

Worth knowing something that surprises people: you can have no overruns whatsoever and still attract a finding. The absence of a reliable record is a breach in itself. What gets penalised then isn't what happened, but what cannot be evidenced.

The date on the letter matters more than the data

A note that has nothing to do with tachographs and decides more cases than any technical point: in administrative proceedings more is lost to a missed deadline than to what actually happened.

The mechanism is always the same and looks harmless. A request arrives, it looks formal, it doesn't sound threatening, and it gets left "for later". Time runs from service, not from when somebody reads it, and once it expires the arguments don't disappear — there is simply nowhere left to put them.

Hence the habit that saves the most cases and costs nothing: open official correspondence the same day and record the date of service. Then assemble the material — and that is the moment you are grateful the archive was already in order, because at that point there is no time to build one.

In short

Prepare in the order the request is written: completeness first, content second. A documented infringement is a conversation; a missing period is a problem.

What gets asked for, and why in that shape

A request doesn't arrive asking for "the paperwork". It arrives asking for a specific period for specific drivers — and that phrasing is not accidental. It is the shape that makes gaps visible.

Which is why the order in which you prepare the response is the reverse of the intuitive one:

• First establish the period is complete — vehicle by vehicle and driver by driver, including the occasional drivers, who are the ones who fall out of the cycle.
• Then that the downloads join up with no days belonging to nobody.
• Only then look at the content. An overrun admits explanation; a gap admits far less.

This is why an operation with documented infringements fares better than one with incomplete data: the first can be explained and corrected; the second leaves questions that are only answered with "I don't know".

TachoTools Analysis: Proactive Defense

In office inspections, most corporate fines are not due to driving time excesses, but poor document management: incomplete files, unjustified gaps, and inconsistent payroll cross-checks.

Our Recommendation: Perform a weekly forensic audit of your fleet. Presenting organized, audited documentation with preventive allegations proves the company exerts "effective direction and control," which drastically reduces penalties through due diligence mitigants.