OIG LEIE vs. SAM.gov Exclusions
Two federal exclusion lists with different scopes, different publishers and different fields. What each one covers, and why a healthcare organization checks both.
Reviewed
These are two different lists maintained by two different agencies for two different purposes, and they overlap without either containing the other. A healthcare organization checking only one is checking half.
Side by side
| HHS-OIG LEIE | SAM.gov Exclusions | |
|---|---|---|
| Maintained by | HHS Office of Inspector General | General Services Administration, populated by many federal agencies |
| Purpose | Bars participation in federal healthcare programs specifically | Bars federal procurement and non-procurement participation government-wide |
| Typical grounds | Healthcare fraud convictions, patient abuse, licence action, controlled-substance offences | Contract fraud, debarment, statutory or regulatory ineligibility, reciprocal exclusions |
| How it is published | A complete CSV, republished monthly, free and unauthenticated | An API and a web search, updated continuously; the API requires a key |
| Carries an NPI | On a minority of records | No |
| Carries a date of birth | For most individuals | No |
| Formerly known as | — | EPLS, the Excluded Parties List System, retired into SAM in 2012 |
Why both, and not just the LEIE
The LEIE is the healthcare list, so the instinct to treat it as sufficient is understandable. Two things make it insufficient on its own.
- Reciprocal exclusions appear in SAM. When a party is excluded by one agency, other agencies may apply the exclusion government-wide. Those records live in SAM, and one can appear there without a corresponding LEIE entry.
- Your vendors are usually not in the LEIE. The LEIE covers parties excluded from healthcare programmes. A billing company, a transport contractor, a medical-supply distributor or a staffing agency is far more likely to appear in SAM than in the LEIE, and the payment prohibition reaches items and services they supply.
The converse is also true: SAM is not a substitute for the LEIE. A clinician excluded under section 1128 for a licence action may appear in the LEIE and nowhere else. The lists answer different questions, and the unified exclusion search runs both because both answers are needed.
What the field difference means in practice
This is the part that changes what a match can tell you. The LEIE publishes a date of birth for most individuals; SAM does not publish one at all, and does not carry an NPI either. So a name match in SAM has almost nothing available to corroborate it on public data, while a name match in the LEIE can often be confirmed or dismissed outright by a date of birth.
Expect weaker SAM matches
Checking each one
- OIG's own search is at exclusions.oig.hhs.gov, and the full file is downloadable monthly.
- SAM's own search is at sam.gov/content/exclusions. There is no bulk file to hold a copy of; the data is queried live, which is why a SAM result carries the time it was checked rather than a publication date.
- NPISignal checks both from one query on the federal exclusion search, and reports each source's outcome separately rather than merging them.
A note on state Medicaid lists
Most states maintain their own exclusion list, and many state Medicaid agreements require screening against them in addition to the two federal sources. Neither the LEIE nor SAM contains them. NPISignal does not cover them today and says so plainly rather than implying broader coverage — if your contracts require state-level screening, that remains separate work.
SAM.gov Exclusions — U.S. General Services AdministrationThe authoritative SAM exclusion search.
Sources
- SAM.gov Exclusions — U.S. General Services Administration. Accessed August 23, 2026.
- Exclusions API documentation — U.S. General Services Administration. Accessed August 23, 2026.
- OIG Exclusions Database — HHS Office of Inspector General. Accessed August 23, 2026.