@pipeworx/ebsa

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Tools: 4

Closed US Department of Labor Employee Benefits Security Administration civil-penalty enforcement actions since 2000 — deficient-filer, late-filer and non-filer penalty assessments against ERISA benefit-plan sponsors for their Form 5500 filings. form5500 already covers the filings themselves (what sponsors reported); this is EBSA’s own enforcement record against sponsors who filed deficiently, late, or not at all — distinct from dol-whd (Wage & Hour back-wage/overtime cases) and osha (safety citations), both of which already live on this same DOL API gateway.

This is a civil-penalty / filing-compliance enforcement record, not a fiduciary-breach litigation docket — EBSA does not publish a bulk dataset of individual fiduciary-breach case outcomes. This is the enforcement dataset that actually exists in structured, bulk-queryable form.

Tools

Auth

Platform key (PLATFORM_DOL_KEY, already set on the gateway for dol-whd and osha) with BYO override via _apiKey. A free key from https://dataportal.dol.gov covers every DOL dataset on this gateway. A live sibling call (dol_whd whd_search) confirmed the platform key is valid right now (2026-10-17) — no new key needed.

Live proxy, same gateway as dol-whd and osha

This pack calls apiprod.dol.gov/v4 — the identical gateway, auth shape and query grammar dol-whd already documents in full in its own README and src/index.ts header. Every trap there applies verbatim here and is not re-derived:

• The catalog endpoint (/v4/datasets/10361) takes an X-API-KEY header or no key at all; the row endpoint (/v4/get/EBSA/ocats/json) rejects a header and needs the key as a query parameter.
• A zero-match query answers HTTP 204 with an empty body, not a 200 with {"data":[]}.
• The upstream throttles by source IP, not by key, and sends no Retry-After — this pack backs off twice, then returns { found: false, reason: "upstream_rate_limited" }.
• filter_object keywords (field, operator, value, and, or) must be lowercase; a wrong dataset name and a malformed filter both answer a generic HTTP 500.

Fields (from the live dataset, not guessed)

Verified live 2026-10-17 against the dataset’s own 10-row preview (no key needed to read it): case_type, ein, pn (plan number), plan_year, plan_name, plan_admin, plan_admin_state, plan_admin_zip_code, final_close_reason, final_close_date, penalty_amount, load_dt.

penalty_amount is a DOL-assigned STRING BUCKET, not an exact dollar figure — observed live values include "over $100,000", "$50,001 - $100,000", "$0-$10,000". This pack passes it through verbatim as penalty_amount_bucket and never parses it into a number.

case_type values observed live: "Deficient Filer" (the only value in the 10-row preview sample); the dataset’s own description also names “late filers” and “non-filers” among the enforcement focus. case_type is matched with like (substring), not an exact enum, since the precise casing of every value was not exhaustively observed.

No individual PII

plan_admin identifies the plan administrator/sponsor — almost always a business entity making a mandatory public filing (e.g. “Shell USA, Inc.”, “Veeva Systems Inc.”, “Spectrum Brands, Inc.” in the live preview), not a private person. Unlike the LCA/PERM record layouts, OCATS carries no point-of-contact or attorney name/email/phone columns at all — there is nothing to drop because the dataset never collected it.

Data sources

• U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration — Office of the Chief Accountant Case Tracking System (OCATS). Closed enforcement cases with a penalty assessment since 2000, published quarterly.
• https://dataportal.dol.gov — key registration and the API Query Builder (same portal dol-whd documents).

Gotchas

• ebsa_coverage’s close-date sample needs a key (same as whd_coverage); the catalog half (name/description/frequency/published_at) does not.
• A sponsor query matches both plan_admin and plan_name with like, and the response says which field matched (matched_fields) — a plan’s own name sometimes names the sponsor (e.g. “Shell USA, Inc. Health & Wellbeing Plan”) when the administrator field alone would miss it.

Tools

• ebsa_search — Search closed EBSA (Employee Benefits Security Administration) civil-penalty enforcement cases since 2000 — deficient-filer, late-filer and non-filer penalty assessments against ERISA benefit-plan spo
• ebsa_sponsor — Full EBSA civil-penalty enforcement history for one named plan sponsor/administrator, with every closed case and a count by case type. Matches the sponsor against both the plan administrator name and
• ebsa_recent — The most recent closed EBSA civil-penalty enforcement actions, newest first, optionally restricted to one case type or state. Returns plan, sponsor, case type, close date/reason and penalty bucket for
• ebsa_coverage — Report what the EBSA OCATS enforcement dataset currently covers: its publication date, update frequency and the close-date range of a sample query. Use to check how current the enforcement data is bef