If you accumulate a total of 4 points in 12 months, the Department of Revenue will send you a point accumulation advisory letter.

If you accumulate a total of 8 or more points in 18 months, the Department of Revenue will suspend your driving privilege.

• 1st suspension - 30 days
• 2nd suspension - 60 days
• 3rd or more suspensions - 90 days

The Department of Revenue will revoke your driving privilege for one year if you accumulate:

• 12 or more points in 12 months
• 18 or more points in 24 months
• 24 or more points in 36 months

When your driving privilege is reinstated following a Point Suspension or Revocation, the Department of Revenue reduces your total points to 4.

Every year you drive without getting new points on your record, the points will be reduced.

• 1 year — total remaining points reduced by one-third
• 2 years — remaining points reduced by one-half
• 3 years — points reduced to zero

Although your points may be reduced to zero, certain types of convictions must remain listed permanently on your Missouri driver record.

In the state of Missouri, the Department of Revenue often times creates what they call a “master add” record which are normally driving records that end with the letters MA.  There are a variety of reasons why these are created, but mainly as placeholders for someone who has done something wrong and the state cannot match it up to their actual driving record, for whatever reason.

We have 8.3 million driving records with 830,000 master add record which equates to 10% of the total database.

When you're looking at habitual offenders then we could see possibly as high as 20% of those people as having a second record that needs to be combined with their actual driving record. Without having those combined we do not have a true picture of that person's driving history.

With the above stated, this creates a great need to search for the person's driving record and any other placeholder records by name within a city or name within a partial zip code or even name and year of birth or name and date of birth rather than specific driver’s license number. (Often times the master add records do have the correct year of birth or even the specific date of birth.)

We have a new user tutorial which details our recommended way for searching effectively for driving records through our system. We think it is worthwhile for you and your staff to review this document. Not only will it help in finding master add records, but will also help with finding the correct driving record on people with names that are spelled in a non-traditional fashion etc.

As always feel free to reach out to us if you need any assistance.  Accounts@FirstInfoSource.com

Every car or truck since the 1981 model year has a unique 17-digit Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) filled with important details, ranging from its engine type to where it was built. The VIN is like a car's Social Security number. You need it when you register your car, buy insurance and bring it in for repairs (so the shop can order the right parts). The police will use it to identify your vehicle if it's stolen. If you are shopping for a used car, you'll need its VIN to run a vehicle history report. Finally, you can use the VIN to check for any recalls of a used car you're considering. Just put the VIN in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's free VIN Look-up Tool and you'll know for sure.

VINs have been used by American automakers since 1954, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, but for years, there was no standardization so they were extremely difficult to decipher. Things are much easier now, but you still need to know the format in order to make sense of those 17 numbers.

Where To Find the VIN
You can find a car's VIN in three major locations: on the driver-side doorjamb, on the firewall in the engine bay and beneath the windshield on the driver side.

Dissecting the VIN
As an example, we're using the VIN from a 2013 Cadillac ATS. Here is the VIN and its breakdown, section by section: 1G6AF5SX6D0125409

World Manufacturer Identifier (1G6) 
The first three digits make up the World Manufacturer Identifier.

• Position one represents the nation of origin, or the final point of assembly. For instance, cars made in the U.S. start with 1,4 or 5, Canada is 2, Mexico is 3, Japan is J, South Korea is K, England is S, Germany is W and Sweden or Finland is Y.
• Position two tells you about the manufacturer. In some cases, it's the letter that begins the manufacturer's name. For example, A is for Audi, B is for BMW, G is for General Motors, L is for Lincoln and N is for Nissan. But that "A" can also stand for Jaguar or Mitsubishi and an "R" can also mean Audi. It may sound confusing, but the next digit ties it all together.
• Position three, when combined with the first two digits, indicates the vehicle's type or manufacturing division. In our example, 1G6 means a Cadillac passenger car. 1G1 means Chevrolet passenger cars and 1GC means Chevrolet trucks. There have been many variations on the World Manufacturer Identifier as brands have come and gone. This Wikipedia page has a list of WMI codes.

Vehicle Descriptor Section (AF5SX6) 
Digits 4 through 9 make up the Vehicle Descriptor Section.

• Positions four through eight describe the car with such information as the model, body type, restraint system, transmission type and engine code.
• Position nine, the "check" digit, is used to detect invalid VINs, based on a mathematical formula that was developed by the Department of Transportation.

Vehicle Identifier Section (D0125409) 
Digits 10 through 17 make up the Vehicle Identifier Section.

• Position 10 indicates the model year. The letters from B-Y correspond to the model years 1981-2000. There is no I, O, Q, U or Z. From 2001-'09, the numbers one through nine were used in place of numbers. The alphabet started over from A in 2010 and will continue until 2030.

Is it confusing? Yes. So here's a list of the model years since 1981: B=1981, C='82, D='83, E='84, F='85, G='86, H='87, J='88, K='89, L='90, M='91, N='92, P='93, R='94, S='95, T='96, V='97, W='98, X='99, Y=2000, 1='01, 2='02, 3='03, 4='04, 5='05, 6='06, 7='07, 8='08, 9='09, A=2010, B='11, C='12, D='13, E='14, F='15,G='16, H='17, J='18

• The letter or number in position 11 indicates the manufacturing plant in which the vehicle was assembled. Each automaker has its own set of plant codes.
• The last 6 digits (positions 12 through 17) are the production sequence numbers. This is the number each car receives on the assembly line. In the case of our Cadillac ATS, it was the 125,409th car to roll off the assembly line in Lansing, Michigan.

Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, has discussed about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

I can't believe people have been wasting their lives like this either! It makes me think that we need a new type of class in schools across the land immediately. Electronic literacy. Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing.

Google itself is trying to teach people a little something with their AGoogleADay.com campaign, but the ability to retrieve information via a search engine is actually much bigger than the search engine itself. We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.

First InfoSource allows for the most broad and wildcard capable searching in the industry. We encourage users to run by broader search terms and then use CTRL+F to narrow their search. It’s all the same cost! Whether we return one result or 90 it’s the same cost. Thus rather than not hitting records and taking your staffs valuable time we encourage you to run partial names and partial zip codes in order to hit your potential record on the first search and then use this “find” feature to locate the exact record you need.