You can run under someone’s authority while yours is active. We worked at a company before getting our own authority and once we got our authority. We stayed with the company to let our authority age for 3 months and then we left that company and ran under our own numbers. Your truck needs to be listed in the IRP of the authority your running under. Cannot be 2 IRP accounts. If I remember correctly.
Never suspend yours unless it's unavoidable. You don't want gaps in your insurance timeline. Your IRP will need to match the authority you're using and it must match the numbers on the door. Basically, plates, insurance and DOT number all go together. Just trade between them when you're hauling with each one.
So how does trip leasing fit into this ? i knew guys that would trip lease , they’d use masking tape and stick a new sign on the door , for a couple days or a couple weeks .
Check this with your insurance agent first! I remember a podcast discussing it a while ago. I think it was one of those podcast co-hosts that used Kevin Rutheford's site. So, if I remember the discussion correctly, it was explained like this: Once your authority is active, it means that your insurance is active and then it may become problematic when you lease on to someone else and in effect use their insurance for liability and cargo, while yours remains still active. In case of an issue, you have two active insurance carriers, and the one from the company you lease onto may see it and refuse the claim, wanting you to use your own insurance, which in turn, seeing that you operated under someone else's authority when the issue happened, may tell them to pound sand too.
Because insurance companies always look for a loophole to avoid paying. They'll investigate and find the other insurance.
Easiest way to avoid this is buy a junked parts truck for $5000 or something and stuff it out of the way someplace. Insure that one with your own auth to keep it active and use the others auth on your own truck. If you need to use your own auth on your work truck occasionally then you need to work it out between your insurances though.
