abigailhaddad/hhs-dab-decisions

HHS Departmental Appeals Board decisions

Every decision the HHS Departmental Appeals Board has published, as typed Parquet with the header and parts of the body parsed into columns.

The Board is an administrative tribunal inside HHS. Its ALJs (Civil Remedies Division) hear a case first and its Appellate Division reviews them, so the two files are two levels of the same tribunal and can be joined on reviews_decision_no / appealed_in.

The Appellate and ALJ corpora are complete against the Board's own published index: of the 9,810 listings on its year-by-year index pages, all 9,767 of the 9,769 that carry an identifiable decision number are here; the other 41 sit outside the check. The Council file is different, and by a wide margin: the Board posts only "certain significant decisions and actions ... selected for posting since they involve the adjudication of issues that may be of interest". For scale, HHS put the Council's annual adjudication capacity at roughly 2,600 appeals in FY2016 and 2,300 at the end of FY2015, against a pending workload above 14,000 (Medicare Appeals Backlog primer). This file holds 224 decisions spanning 2001 to 2015 — on the order of a percent of one decade's output. It is a selection of significant decisions, and a count over it is not a count of what the Council decided.

Derived from Kmisener/HHS-DAB-Decisions, which collected and text-extracted the original corpus. This adds the decisions it was missing, parsed metadata, website-furniture removal, evidence-based category labels and a typed schema. Build code and method: abigailhaddad/HHS_DAB_Collect-Sort (a fork of the repository the source dataset came from).

What the decisions are about

On the ALJ side, most cases run against CMS or the HHS Inspector General: exclusions barring an individual from Medicare and Medicaid, nursing-home enforcement and civil money penalties, revoked billing privileges, CLIA lab sanctions, EMTALA penalties, and FDA tobacco-retailer enforcement. On the Appellate side, and especially before 2000, a large share are grant disputes — Head Start, TANF, child support enforcement, foster care, tribal self-determination contracts.

Columns

Quick start

import duckdb
duckdb.sql("""
  SELECT unnest(dispositions) AS outcome, count(*) AS n
  FROM 'dab.parquet' WHERE reviews_decision_no IS NOT NULL
  GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC
""").show()

What this does not establish

• —Dispositions are partial by design. They are read only from operative first-person phrasing in a decision's own conclusion. Empty means "not stated unambiguously here", never "nothing happened", so a rate over the labelled rows is a rate over a non-random subset. disposition_text carries the conclusion verbatim.
• —`appealed_in` is a join, not a census. An appeal that settled, was withdrawn, or is pending produces no Appellate decision, so empty means "no Appellate decision here names it".
• —Category labels are a heuristic. Membership is decided from where a citation appears and how often, after case citations are blanked out. No precision or recall is claimed; there is no hand-labelled sample.
• —The slices are not a partition. 6,617 of 10,243 decisions (65%) land in at least one slice and 1,420 in more than one, out of 76 possible category/corpus pairs. There is no residual category.
• —Some text is wrong rather than missing. A few decisions extract to about one character per page and are flagged by text_layer_ok. Others extract at normal length and are garbled — DAB No. 88 (1980) reads "Financisl", "yesr" — and nothing flags those. DAB No. 437 (1983) is published by HHS as an empty page and is absent for that reason.
• —Decision numbers come from three sources, best first: the Board's index, the source filename, then the header. The header alone agreed with the index only 64% of the time — OCR mangles the label in the older scans, and a failed parse picks up a citation to a different decision. decision_no_source records which was used.

Provenance

Decisions are published at hhs.gov/about/agencies/dab/decisions, which returns 403 to automated clients, so collection routes through the Internet Archive and, for anything published since its last crawl, a browser attached over the DevTools protocol. The decisions are works of the United States government and are not subject to copyright.

Built 2026-09-18 from the corpus in this repository.