Methodology

Red Flag Radar reads several US public registers and turns each into structured, point-in-time events for a company. Every signal carries a rule version, an evidence hash back to the source and its as-of date. The USPTO IP corpus is additionally Ed25519-signed, row by row, verifiable at /v1/pubkey — that is the dataset sold under licence. The other registers are not signed today; their integrity rests on the evidence hash and the source link. Fields are descriptive, never conclusive. See how it works for the product overview.

Each source follows its own availability model. Filing and recordation events (USPTO, SEC) are dated as of their public record date, no look-ahead. Historical SBA credit outcomes are retrospective labels — the FOIA feed carries a current status per loan — with true point-in-time vintage capture only from 2026 onward (each vintage snapshotted as it publishes). We do not claim a perfect reconstruction of what was publicly observable each quarter before then.

The registers

• SBA PPP loans: the closed 2020-2021 Paycheck Protection Program, published in full under FOIA. Loans on record with their amounts and forgiveness outcomes. A charge-off is a late outcome at LOAN level, never a company default. The source publishes no employer identifier, so the register attaches by exact legal name and state and can never assert an identity. Individuals (sole proprietors, the self-employed, independent contractors) are not loaded.
• USPTO — IP collateral: patents pledged as loan collateral (security interests) and block portfolio assignments — detectors below.
• SBA 7(a)/504: loan-level credit outcomes (charge-offs / pay-offs) from FOIA data, with an honest observability denominator — see SBA credit outcomes.
• FMCSA: motor-carrier operating-authority suspensions after an insurance lapse — a deterministic two-leg sequence from explicit MOTUS fields.
• OSHA — workplace safety (DOL enforcement): high-severity only — willful (the employer knew and ignored) and repeat violations, the strongest enforcement markers. An OSHA citation is a contestable public record (often under appeal): the event says "cited", never "guilty". Ordinary inspections and serious/other violations are not surfaced. Fatality/catastrophe events are a later addition.
• EPA ECHO — environmental: high-severity only — a formal enforcement action (a penalty-bearing action under the Clean Air / Clean Water / RCRA statutes) or significant non-compliance. A contestable public record (often settled or under appeal): "subject to a formal action", never "guilty" or "polluter". Ordinary inspections and informal actions are not surfaced.
• openFDA — product recalls: high-severity only — a Class I recall (FDA's most serious class: a reasonable probability of serious adverse health consequences) or a still-ongoing recall, across drug / food / device. A recall is a contestable and often firm-initiated safety action: "subject to a Class I recall on record", never "dangerous". Terminated lower-class recalls are not surfaced.
• DOL Form 5500: EIN-grounded identity backbone + the name-variant corpus that resolves a company across registers.
• Federal awards & eligibility (USAspending + SAM.gov): federal contract/grant dependency — the total obligated value of a company's federal awards — plus SAM.gov registration status and exclusions. A federal award is financing, never adverse; the risk signal is a lapsed registration or an exclusion (the entity cannot receive new federal awards). A period-over-period award-flow signal needs transaction-level obligations and is a later addition, not shown today.
• SEC: 8-K accounting / audit / governance red flags and CMBS loan distress, federated from the SEC module.

Entity resolution across registers

The registers do not share a company identifier, and each refers to a company by name — an unreliable key in both directions: one company files under many spellings (IBM, Intl Business Machines Corp, International Business Machines Corporation), while unrelated companies share a name (two Acme Holdings, in different states). Matching on the name alone both misses real links and invents false ones.

Instead, every register record is resolved to a canonical entity. The backbone is the public DOL Form 5500 filings, which tie a company to its EIN (the federal employer tax ID) and record every name spelling it has filed under. A record from another register is attached to that backbone by name + state, grounded on this EIN-linked name corpus — not by bare string equality. A name that resolves to a single EIN is linked; a name shared by several EINs that the state cannot disambiguate is sent to a human review queue, never guessed (precision before recall). Every link carries a method, a confidence, and a valid-from / valid-to date, so mergers, tax-ID reassignment and ticker reuse cannot leak look-ahead or survivorship through the graph.

Identity is then reported on two honest axes: a name match (how well the string matched) is kept separate from entity confidence (whether it is one real company). A name-only match with no EIN, state or graph anchor is a candidate pending review, never a resolved entity. Because the backbone is EIN-anchored, a name + state query can still resolve to a proven entity and surface every register that entity appears in — a signal present in two registers on the same proven company, not a name coincidence. Coverage and matcher precision are measured on audited samples, not asserted — see coverage & precision.

IP signal detectors

IP_SECURITY_INTEREST_RECORDED

Fires when a recorded patent assignment's conveyance is a security interest (patents pledged as loan collateral). Releases and terminations are excluded. The flagged entity is the assignor (the patent owner granting the pledge).

PORTFOLIO_ASSIGNMENT_OUT

Fires when a plain assignment transfers a large block of patents out in one recordation (sale / M&A / distress). Quarantined to review before publication.

A recorded filing is a fact, not a judgment about the entity, its patents, its loans, or its securities.