How to Screen Employees Against the OIG Exclusion List

To screen employees against the OIG exclusion list, search each person's name in the official LEIE online search tool at oig.hhs.gov, verify any potential match using OIG's Social Security number verification step, document the result with a date, and repeat every month. The process is free but tedious, and it has to cover everyone who touches federal health care program business — employees, contractors, and vendors alike. This guide walks through the exact steps, explains where manual screening goes wrong, and shows what an automated alternative looks like.

What the LEIE is

The List of Excluded Individuals/Entities (LEIE) is the federal database of people and organizations barred from participating in Medicare, Medicaid, and all other federal health care programs. It is maintained by the HHS Office of Inspector General and currently contains roughly 80,000 active exclusions. People land on it for reasons ranging from health care fraud convictions and patient abuse to license revocations and defaulted health education loans.

The stakes are the reason screening exists at all. If an excluded person furnishes items or services that your organization bills to a federal health care program, you can face civil monetary penalties of up to $10,000 per claimed item or service, plus an assessment of up to three times the amount claimed, plus possible exclusion from the programs yourself (42 U.S.C. §1320a-7a). OIG lays this out in its May 2013 Special Advisory Bulletin on the Effect of Exclusion. Note that the prohibition is broad: it covers not just direct patient care but administrative work, IT services, billing, and anything else that feeds into a federally reimbursed claim.

The manual method: OIG's online search tool

OIG provides a free searchable version of the LEIE. Here is the manual process from start to finish.

1. Go to the official search tool

The search tool lives at exclusions.oig.hhs.gov, linked from OIG's exclusions page. Ignore lookalike third-party sites — this is the only authoritative source for LEIE data.

2. Search each individual by last and first name

Enter the person's last name and first name. Search maiden names and other former names too — exclusions follow the person, not the name they currently use. For businesses and vendors, use the entity search. You can check up to five names per search, but each person on your roster still needs their own documented result.

3. Verify any potential match

If a name comes back with results, you have a potential match, not a confirmed one. Common names produce plenty of false hits. The online tool lets you take a potential match and verify it by entering the employee's Social Security number (or EIN for entities); the tool then tells you whether the SSN matches the excluded person's record. Only after that step do you know whether your employee is actually the person on the list.

4. Print or save dated documentation

A search you cannot prove might as well not have happened. Save a dated record of every search — including the searches that returned nothing — so you can show an auditor exactly who was screened, when, and with what result. This is the audit trail piece that most manual processes quietly skip.

A note on the downloadable data file

OIG also publishes the LEIE as a downloadable file, which is what most software (including ours) screens against. Be aware that the public file does not contain Social Security numbers, so any match you generate from it is by definition a potential match. OIG is explicit that matches from the downloadable file should be confirmed through the online tool's SSN verification step before you treat them as real. Any vendor that claims file-based matches are automatically “confirmed exclusions” is overstating what the data can do.

Who has to be screened

Screening is not just for clinicians. OIG's guidance covers anyone who provides items or services payable, directly or indirectly, by a federal health care program:

• Employees — clinical and non-clinical, including billing staff, administrators, schedulers, and IT.
• Contractors and temporary staff — agency nurses, locum providers, per-diem caregivers, consultants.
• Vendors and referring/ordering entities — billing companies, staffing agencies, suppliers whose work feeds federal claims.
• New hires, before they start — screen at hire, then keep screening for as long as they work for you.

How often: monthly

A one-time check at hire is not enough, because people get excluded after they are hired. The payment prohibition in 42 CFR §1001.1901 applies from the effective date of an exclusion regardless of when you find out about it, and OIG updates the LEIE every month. That is why OIG's 2013 Special Advisory Bulletin recommends checking the list monthly: screening on the same cadence the list changes is how you minimize the window in which an excluded person is on your payroll without your knowledge. We cover the details, including how state Medicaid agencies layer their own requirements on top, in our guide to the OIG monthly screening requirement.

Where manual monthly screening breaks down

The manual process is free and it works — once. Doing it every month for an entire roster is where it falls apart in practice:

• Time. Searching, verifying, and documenting 30–100 names takes hours each month, and it is exactly the kind of task that slips when the person responsible has a real job to do.
• No built-in audit trail. The search tool does not remember what you searched. Unless someone saves dated proof of every search every month, you have no evidence of compliance when a surveyor or auditor asks.
• Staff turnover. Manual screening usually lives in one person's head. When that office manager leaves, the process leaves with them — and the gap often is not discovered until an audit.
• Repeated false positives. The same common-name employee generates the same potential match every single month, and someone has to re-resolve it every single time.

None of this makes manual screening wrong. If you have five employees and a disciplined routine, it is a perfectly reasonable approach. The failure mode is scale plus time.

The automated option

ExclusionWatch automates the monthly loop for small healthcare employers. You upload your roster once — manually or by CSV — and screening runs automatically every month, right after OIG republishes the LEIE. Matching is exact, fuzzy, and NPI-based; adding NPI and date of birth is optional but meaningfully reduces false positives. When you resolve a false positive once, the system remembers that resolution on future runs, so the same common-name employee does not become a monthly chore. Every run produces a timestamped, audit-ready report (see a sample), and you get an email alert if anything needs your attention.

One honest limitation: ExclusionWatch covers the federal LEIE only. It does not screen SAM.gov or state Medicaid exclusion lists (state lists are on our roadmap). If your state requires screening its own list — many do — read our guide to state Medicaid exclusion lists to see what applies to you. For how we stack up against doing it yourself or using an enterprise platform, see the comparison page.

Plans start at $49/month for up to 25 roster entries, $99 for 100, and $149 for 500 — full details on the pricing page. If you just want to check one name right now, our free LEIE check tool does that with no signup.

Frequently asked questions

Is checking the OIG exclusion list free?

Yes. The official search tool at exclusions.oig.hhs.gov is free, and so is the downloadable data file. What you pay for with a service like ExclusionWatch is the automation, the remembered false-positive resolutions, and the timestamped audit trail — not access to the data itself.

What happens if I employ someone on the exclusion list?

If an excluded person furnishes items or services billed to a federal health care program, your organization is exposed to civil monetary penalties of up to $10,000 per claimed item or service, an assessment of up to three times the amount claimed, and potentially exclusion from the programs yourself. If you discover an excluded employee, talk to your compliance counsel promptly — OIG operates a self-disclosure protocol, and self-disclosure generally goes better than being found out.

A name matched in the LEIE. Is my employee excluded?

Not necessarily. A name match is a potential match until you verify it. Use the online tool's SSN verification step to confirm whether the record actually belongs to your employee. Most matches on common names turn out to be different people.

Do I need to screen against state lists too, or just the LEIE?

The LEIE is the federal baseline, but many states maintain their own Medicaid exclusion lists and require providers to screen them — often monthly. ExclusionWatch currently covers the federal LEIE only, so check your state's rules; our state list guide is a good starting point.

How often is the LEIE updated?

OIG updates the LEIE monthly, adding newly excluded individuals and entities and removing those who have been reinstated. That monthly refresh is the reason monthly screening is the standard cadence — and it is when ExclusionWatch automatically re-screens every roster.