Truck drivers lose licenses after driving school ‘lost’ their records

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) - The North Carolina DMV was forced to recall commercial driver licenses of hundreds of truck drivers after the DMV couldn’t verify they actually passed the test.

The road portion of the test records were supposed to be kept by Carolina Truck Driving School but employees there couldn’t produce them during a NCDMV audit.

More than 500 truck drivers in North and South Carolina who attended Carolina Truck Driving School received letters from their state DMVs telling them that they had to retake their CDL road test in less than a month or it would be cancelled.

“You have to do it for them (DMV) to make sure they know what you’re doing,” truck driver Colby Good Sr. said. “So that was a hassle.”

Good attended Carolina Truck Driving School in Jan. 2018. He says while he was there, he spent a week in the classroom and then another three to four weeks in the school’s yard practicing maneuvers.

Ultimately he took the test at Carolina Truck Driving School under the supervision of a third-party tester.

Now, many of the drivers are planning on filing a lawsuit against Carolina Truck Driving School.

“He didn’t get the benefit of his bargain,” South Carolina attorney Patrick Knie said. “He paid to go to school, spend over $5,000 and now he’s got to retake the test.”

Knie is representing some of the drivers and said he will be filing class action lawsuits in both North and South Carolina. He says that some of the drivers haven’t been able to pass the re-examination and have lost their jobs in the process.

Knie says there are still a lot of questions surrounding the third-party testing protocols at NCDMV and he hopes the lawsuits will help dig up answers.

“You just question whether or not that’s a good policy. That’s the purpose of the state DMV, to test,” Knie said.

The NCDMV would not provide a copy of the entire audit on Carolina Truck Driving School but did give WBTV a copy of a summary.

In it the DMV says “Carolina Truck Driving Training School employees could not determine where the CDL skills tests records were and could not provide the CDL skills test record documents for examination.”

The school shutdown shortly after the audit.

WBTV tried contacting the President of Carolina Truck Driving School Barry Henson. Henson is also listed as a company official for both the Tennessee Truck Driving School and the Tampa Truck Driving School.

A person who answered the phone at Tennessee Truck Driving School said Henson wasn’t available and provided WBTV with his email address. Henson has not yet responded to WBTV’s emailed questions about what happened to the records.

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