Why Do DBA Investigations Require Multiple Databases?
No single federal database answers the question "who was the carrier?" They were not designed to. DOL tracks claims. USAspending tracks contracts. SAM.gov tracks entity registrations. OALJ publishes legal decisions. Each one captures a different moment in the life of a DBA employer-carrier relationship.
The investigator's job is to stitch these moments into a timeline. When you understand what temporal data each source provides, you stop wasting time searching the wrong database for information it was never meant to contain.
ClaimTrove draws from 18 distinct federal data sources containing over one million records. Here is what each major source contributes to the timeline and where the gaps are.
What Does DOL Case Summary Data Tell You About Timing?
The Department of Labor publishes case summary data that shows DBA claim volumes broken down by carrier, employer, and fiscal year. ClaimTrove indexes 4,900+ of these records.
This data answers a specific question: how many claims did a given carrier handle for a given employer in a given fiscal year? It does not tell you about individual claimants or specific injuries. It tells you about volume patterns.
The temporal resolution is fiscal year. That means you know a carrier-employer relationship existed during FY2016 (October 2015 through September 2016), but you cannot pin it to a specific month. For most investigations, fiscal year resolution is sufficient. If the date of injury falls within a fiscal year where a carrier handled 90% of that employer's claims, the match is strong.
Case summary data is strongest for establishing which carriers were dominant for a given employer during a given period. It is weaker for identifying exact policy start and end dates. Think of it as the wide-angle lens in your toolkit: it shows you the overall landscape without fine detail.
One limitation to watch for: case summary data reflects claims filed, not policies issued. A claim filed in FY2017 might relate to an injury from FY2015. The lag between injury and claim filing means the fiscal year in the case summary is not always the same as the fiscal year of the injury.
What Do OALJ Decisions Reveal About Specific Cases?
Administrative Law Judge decisions from the Office of Administrative Law Judges are the most granular temporal source in DBA research. Each decision names the parties: claimant, employer, and carrier (or TPA). Each decision has a filing date and often references the date of injury, the date of last exposure, and the period of employment.
ClaimTrove indexes over 5,000 OALJ decisions. These are full legal decisions, not summaries. They contain the actual names of the parties as they appeared in the proceeding, which makes them the most reliable source for confirming employer-carrier pairings at a specific point in time.
The temporal data in an OALJ decision is precise. You can often extract the exact date of injury, the employment period, and the policy period from the decision text. When an OALJ decision from 2017 states that Carrier X insured Employer Y for injuries occurring between March 2015 and December 2016, that is a confirmed data point you can take to the bank.
The limitation is coverage. OALJ decisions only exist for cases that were disputed. The vast majority of DBA claims are resolved without a formal hearing. So while OALJ data is the most precise, it only covers a fraction of all employer-carrier relationships. If the employer you are researching never had a disputed claim, OALJ data will not help.
OALJ decisions also have a publication lag. A decision published in 2019 might concern an injury from 2014. That lag is actually useful, because it means older decisions often contain historical carrier information that predates the decision by several years.
How Does USAspending Data Map Contract Timelines?
USAspending.gov is the federal government's public record of contract awards, and understanding how to read USAspending data for DBA investigations is an essential skill. ClaimTrove indexes over 43,000 prime contract awards and 4,300+ subaward records relevant to DBA employers.
The temporal data here is the contract period of performance: a start date and an end date. This tells you when an employer was performing work under a specific government contract. It does not directly tell you who the DBA carrier was. But it establishes when the employer was active, which agency funded the work, and where the work was performed.
Contract periods of performance are the backbone of any investigation timeline. If your claimant was injured in July 2017, and USAspending shows their employer had an active contract with the Army Corps of Engineers from 2015 through 2019, you now know the agency and the timeframe. That agency connection can lead you to mandatory carrier programs or agency-specific procurement requirements that narrow the carrier search.
Subaward data adds another layer. When a subcontractor relationship is recorded in USAspending, you can see which prime contractor was above them in the chain. The subaward record includes its own period of performance, the prime award number, and the subaward amount. This is how you trace a subcontractor back to a prime and then to the prime's carrier requirements.
The gap in USAspending is completeness. Not all subcontracts are reported. Lower-tier subcontracts especially are underrepresented. And USAspending does not track insurance arrangements. It tracks money. You are using contract timing as a proxy for insurance timing, which works well but is not direct evidence of coverage.
What Do FOIA Database Results Add to the Timeline?
FOIA releases from federal agencies contain some of the most direct evidence of DBA coverage. These records include filing dates, coverage periods, and employer-carrier associations that do not appear in any other public source.
The temporal data in FOIA results varies by release. Some records include explicit policy effective dates and expiration dates. Others include filing dates that bracket when an employer had active coverage. Either way, these dates fill a gap that no other source covers: the actual period of insurance coverage as reported to the federal government.
ClaimTrove integrates FOIA database results as a primary source for employer-carrier temporal matching. When a FOIA record shows a coverage filing dated March 2016 for an employer with a policy period through December 2017, and your claimant's injury occurred in September 2016, you have a direct temporal match from an authoritative source.
FOIA data is strongest where other sources are weakest. DOL case summaries give you fiscal year resolution. OALJ decisions only cover disputed claims. USAspending does not track insurance. FOIA records from the relevant agencies can provide the actual coverage dates that bridge those gaps.
The limitation of FOIA data is availability. Not all FOIA releases have been digitized, indexed, or made publicly accessible. The records that exist in ClaimTrove come from specific FOIA releases and data aggregation efforts. Coverage is extensive for major employers and major theaters of operation but may be sparse for smaller employers or less common locations.
How Does SAM.gov Fit Into the Timeline?
SAM.gov, the System for Award Management, is not a DBA-specific database. It is the federal government's central registry for entities that do business with the government. ClaimTrove indexes over 865,000 SAM entity registrations.
The temporal data in SAM.gov is entity registration dates: when an entity first registered, when the registration was last updated, and the registration expiration date. This tells you whether an employer was an active federal contractor at a given point in time.
SAM.gov is most useful at the beginning and end of a timeline. If an employer's SAM registration expired in 2015, and the claimant's injury occurred in 2018, that raises questions about whether the employer was still performing government contract work at the time of injury. Conversely, if the employer registered in SAM.gov in 2012 and the injury occurred in 2010, the employer may have been operating under a different entity or a different contracting arrangement before they registered.
SAM.gov also tracks entity status changes: active, inactive, excluded. An employer that appears in the SAM exclusion list (over 16,700 exclusion records in ClaimTrove) was barred from federal contracting. The exclusion date and the basis for exclusion can be relevant if the claimant's injury occurred around the time of an enforcement action.
Think of SAM.gov as the frame around your timeline. It tells you when the employer entered and exited the federal contracting ecosystem. The other sources fill in what happened while they were there.
How Do You Layer These Sources Into a Single Timeline?
The power of multi-source investigation is in the layering. Each source covers a different time period with different granularity, and together they create a more complete picture than any single source provides.
Start with SAM.gov to establish the entity's active period in federal contracting. Overlay USAspending data to identify specific contracts and their periods of performance. Layer in DOL case summary data to see which carriers were handling claims for that employer in each fiscal year. Add OALJ decisions to confirm specific employer-carrier pairings at precise dates. Fill remaining gaps with FOIA database results that provide actual coverage dates.
When sources agree, your confidence is high. If DOL case summary data shows Carrier X handling 80% of claims for an employer in FY2017, and an OALJ decision from that period names the same carrier, and FOIA records show a coverage filing for that carrier during the same period, you have three independent confirmations.
When sources disagree, that is a signal to investigate further. If OALJ data names one carrier and FOIA records name another for the same period, one of them might reference a TPA instead of the actual carrier. Or the employer might have switched carriers mid-year. The disagreement is not an error. It is information.
ClaimTrove runs this layering process automatically across all 18 sources. Each carrier match includes a confidence score derived from the number of confirming sources, the temporal proximity of the match to the injury date, and the source quality weighting. Run an investigation to see the timeline visualization in action.
Which Source Should You Check First?
If you are investigating manually, follow the 5-step carrier investigation workflow and start with OALJ decisions. They are the most precise and publicly accessible source. Search for the employer name (and aliases) in OALJ decision text and look for decisions from the same fiscal year as the injury.
If OALJ produces nothing, move to DOL case summary data for fiscal year carrier patterns. Then check USAspending for the contracting chain and agency relationship. Finally, check whether FOIA database results exist for the employer.
If you are using ClaimTrove, you do not need to prioritize. The engine queries all sources simultaneously and returns a ranked, time-stamped set of carrier matches with source citations. The confidence scoring tells you which matches are strongest and why.
What Gaps Still Exist Even With All These Sources?
Transparency matters. Even with 18 data sources and over a million records, gaps exist.
Small employers with fewer than fifty employees overseas are underrepresented across all sources. They generate fewer claims, fewer OALJ decisions, and fewer FOIA filings. Their contracts may be too small to appear prominently in USAspending.
Non-Afghanistan, non-Iraq locations have thinner data coverage. As our 10-year DBA claims trend analysis shows, the bulk of DBA data in federal sources comes from the major theaters of operation during the Global War on Terror. Investigations involving contractors in Africa, Southeast Asia, or Eastern Europe may have fewer data points to work with.
Pre-2005 data is sparse. Federal spending transparency requirements expanded significantly after the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. Contract data before that period is less complete in USAspending and related databases.
These gaps do not make investigation impossible. They mean that for some cases, you will need to supplement database research with traditional investigative methods: FOIA requests, subpoenas, and direct inquiries to the DOL. But knowing where the gaps are is half the battle. You waste less time searching databases that were never going to have the answer.
How Does This Change Your Investigation Process?
Understanding what each database shows, and equally what it does not show, transforms DBA investigation from guesswork into structured research. You stop asking "is the answer in this database?" and start asking "what piece of the timeline does this database fill?"
The timeline approach also makes your work product stronger. When you present a carrier identification supported by four independent federal sources with overlapping temporal coverage, that is a different level of credibility than "we found a name in one database."
ClaimTrove was built around this timeline methodology. Every investigation produces a layered timeline showing which sources confirmed which carrier during which period. The result is not just a carrier name. It is a documented chain of evidence from federal records. See it in action with your next case.