How Red Flag Radar works

Red Flag Radar turns public records into forensic, point-in-time risk signals — sourced, rule-versioned, evidence-hashed, and Ed25519-signed for the USPTO IP corpus. Every signal is a factual report of a public filing: never a judgment about a company, never a prediction. Not investment or legal advice.

The public records we read

A company rarely lives in one register. We read several US public sources and line them up against a single entity:

SBA PPP loans

The closed 2020-2021 Paycheck Protection Program, published in full under FOIA: loans on record, amounts and forgiveness outcomes. A charge-off is a late loan-level outcome, never a company default. Attached by name and state; the source publishes no identifier.

USPTO — IP collateral

Patents pledged as loan collateral (security interests) and block portfolio assignments. Patents →

SEC — 8-K red flags

Auditor changes, restatements, late-filing notices. SEC 8-K →

CMBS — loan distress

Special servicing, maturity default, appraisal reductions. CMBS →

SBA 7(a)/504 — credit outcomes

Small-business loan charge-offs and pay-offs (a late, loan-level outcome). SBA credit →

FMCSA — operating authority

Motor-carrier authority suspensions after an insurance lapse.

OSHA — workplace safety

High-severity enforcement: willful and repeat safety violations (an operational-disruption signal).

EPA — environmental

High-severity enforcement: formal actions (Clean Air / Clean Water / RCRA) and significant non-compliance.

openFDA — product recalls

High-severity recalls: Class I (the most serious class) and ongoing recalls across drug, food and device. FDA recalls →

DOL Form 5500 — identity

EIN-grounded identity backbone and the name-variant corpus that ties the registers together.

Federal awards & eligibility

Federal contract/grant dependency (USAspending) with SAM.gov registration & exclusion status.

Two ways to use it

Look up one company

The cross-register dossier resolves a company across every register and shows what each one holds — credit, IP collateral, operating authority, SEC presence — on one point-in-time page, with a common timeline. Or enrich a whole book of counterparties at once.

Browse the signals

Public, indexable pages: today's red flags, by flag type, and per register (SEC 8-K, SBA). RSS + delayed JSON feeds.

How a signal is built

Deterministic pipeline, precision before recall: detector → flag → score → evidence. Every signal carries an as-of date (computed point-in-time, no look-ahead), a rule version and an evidence hash back to the source filing; the USPTO IP corpus also carries an Ed25519 signature verifiable at /v1/pubkey. Confidence is kept separate from severity wherever a register provides it. A record that fails a check, or an entity match below threshold, goes to review — never straight to the public surface. See the methodology.

Each source has its own availability model. Filing and recordation events (USPTO, SEC) use their public record date; historical SBA outcomes are retrospective labels, with point-in-time vintage capture from 2026 onward.

Reading a dossier honestly

Names are not identities. The dossier reports two separate things: a name match (how well the name string matched) and an entity confidence (how sure we are it is one real company). An exact name with no EIN or state is a candidate — review required, not a resolved entity. Absence is stated as absence: “no confident SEC match” is not “private”.

Public vs pilot

The public pages and feeds are free (acquisition). The company dossier and book aggregate nominative distress on private companies, so they are a gated pilot (an API key). The computed-features API, webhooks, deep history and dataset are the paid product, sold direct — see pricing and the data sample.

What it is not

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the USPTO, the SEC, or any government agency. A recorded filing is a fact, not an allegation of wrongdoing and not a prediction of invalidation, default or bankruptcy. Not investment or legal advice.

Start with a company dossier →