The Major Blind Spot in Federal-Only Screening

Where exclusions come from matters as much as how many there are. State exclusion lists account for 77% of all exclusions found in this analysis. Federal lists — the OIG and SAM databases that most monitoring programs check first — account for only 23%. On average, it takes about 420 days for a state exclusion to reach the OIG LEIE. Currently, 58% of state exclusions (more than 51,000) are not listed on the OIG LEIE. This finding is significant because state exclusions outnumber federal lists more than 3-to-1. Monitoring programs built around federal lists alone, or that rely much more heavily on federal lists, are missing most of the exclusion risk in this dataset.