75,001 Exclusions Your NPI Screen Will Never Match
OIG's exclusion file carries an NPI column, and 75,001 of its 83,842 active records leave it blank. Coverage runs 86.8% for physician assistants and 2.6% for nurse aides, which is backwards from where the civil money penalty actually sits. Four entities settled employment-exclusion cases with OIG this year for $406,151, and every one of them self-disclosed.
Every month somebody on your compliance side runs the roster against the OIG exclusion list, and every month the match logic decides what counts as a hit.
We pulled the file today to see what that logic has to work with. 15.6 MB, eighteen columns, 83,842 active exclusion records.
One of the eighteen columns is NPI.
75,001 of the records leave it blank or fill it with the placeholder 0000000000. That is 89.5% of the list.
The comfortable read is that this is legacy weight, decades of pre-NPI records sitting at the bottom of the file waiting to age out. Reasonable, and wrong.
Exclusions dated in 2026 carry an NPI 28.9% of the time (chart below), which is roughly where the rate has sat since 2023.
Seventeen years after the field started getting filled in at all, seven in ten new exclusions still arrive without one.
Well, OIG never promised you the field. The 2013 Special Advisory Bulletin lists what the LEIE publishes: the name at the time of exclusion, the provider type, the authority, the state of residence, "and a mechanism to verify search results via Social Security Number (SSN) or Employer Identification Number (EIN)."
The NPI is absent from that sentence. The column is there because OIG happened to have the number sometimes.
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