Implementation Guidelines - Federal Transit Administration - U.S. ...

Any supervisors or other company
official who may be called upon to make
this determination, must be trained in the
facts, circumstances, physical evidence,
physical signs and symptoms, or patterns of
performance and/or behavior that are
associated with use. Supervisors must also
know the proper procedures for confronting
and referring the employee for testing. If
supervisors or other company officials are
not trained, or are not fair and objective in
requesting reasonable suspicion tests,
employee complaints of harassment may
result. Be careful not to expect that training
alone will make your supervisors experts in
detecting substance abuse. Even with
training, the overt signs and symptoms of
substance abuse can often be masked and
may be subtle enough to avoid direct
detection. Training is described in more
detail in Chapter 5, “Training.”
If one supervisor or other company
official, trained to identify the signs and
symptoms of drug and alcohol use,
reasonably concludes that objective facts
may indicate drug use or alcohol misuse,
this is sufficient justification for testing. A
final practical check is whether the
supervisor would have been less responsible
in not taking action than in asking the
employee to submit to testing. Remember,
safety is the first priority.
The supervisor’s decision should pass
the “reasonable prudent individual” test,
which simply means a similarly trained and
experienced supervisor, being reasonable
and prudent and having observed and noted
the same facts, signs, and circumstances
could have reached the same conclusion.
Hunches and “gut feelings” are not valid in
making a reasonable suspicion
determination. A reasonable suspicion
referral must be based on a trained
supervisor’s specific, contemporaneous,
articulable observations concerning the
appearance, behavior, speech, or body odor
of the covered employee.
Reasonable suspicion referrals may be
triggered by incidents and complaints by
other employees or passengers during the
workday. In this situation, the supervisor
must investigate the claims and make the
reasonable suspicion decision based on
his/her own observations, not hearsay. It is
imperative that reasonable suspicion
decisions be made quickly and correctly
based on the objective facts that are present
at the time of the observation.
Only one trained supervisor or company
official is required to make a reasonable
suspicion determination. However, the
preamble to the regulation clarifies that
employers are permitted to require two or
more supervisors to make referrals as long
as each is trained and each makes the direct
observation leading to the reasonable
suspicion determination.
A reasonable suspicion test for drugs can
be conducted anytime a covered employee is
on duty. Employers should clearly define
Chapter 6. Types of Testing 6-6 August 2002