Guides

• Automating ACORD 25 Verification for Vendor Onboarding

  What a certificate of insurance shows, why manual COI review is slow and error-prone, and how to automate the check against your own coverage requirements.

• Blank, Unreadable, or Absent

  Handling illegible fields in ACORD 25 extraction: why a blank cell and an unreadable one need different answers, and why confidence is not a refusal.

• Certificate Holder vs Additional Insured

  Certificate holder vs additional insured: why only one gives you coverage on someone else's policy, and what a certificate can and cannot prove.

• Coverage Requirements as Data

  The schema a certificate of insurance is checked against, and five ways a requirements check silently passes a rule it never ran.

• CPSC's Recall API: Nine Traps in saferproducts.gov's Recall Service

  Reading U.S. consumer product recalls from code: XML by default, a legal suffix that finds nothing, a firm usually not listed as Manufacturer, and more.

• EPA ECHO API: Nine Traps in the Facility Search Services

  Querying EPA's ECHO REST services from code: errors sent as HTTP 200, filters silently ignored, a download that fails as HTML, and six more traps.

• How to Check a Supplier Against the UFLPA Entity List

  What the UFLPA presumption means, what the official Entity List actually contains, how its aliases are written, and what a name screen cannot tell you.

• Is the 6-Digit HS Code Enough to Estimate U.S. Duty?

  Measured across all 5,612 subheadings: how often a 6-digit HS code fixes the U.S. general duty rate, where it fails, and what it can never tell you.

• Parsing SEC Form 4 XML: Nine Traps in EDGAR's Filing Data

  Reading insider trades from EDGAR's Form 4 XML: the filing-list filter that returns other companies' trades, boolean flags in two dialects and seven more traps.

• SAM.gov's Exclusions Extract as Data: Ten Traps in Screening Vendors Against It

  Screening vendors against SAM.gov's daily Exclusions extract: a 302 download, a layout that misdescribes the file, OFAC rows, repeated records and more.

• Screening supplier names against FDA Import Alerts: the name traps

  FDA spells firm names its own way. Five ways that breaks an automated Import Alert screen: legal forms, spacing, accents, the Green List, countrywide alerts.

• Searching openFDA Recalls by Company: Nine Traps in the Enforcement API

  Nine measured traps in searching openFDA enforcement reports by company name — three of them return a clean-looking answer about a firm that does have recalls.

• The ACORD 25 Changed in December 2025

  Edition 2025/12 turns the limits column into a floor rather than a figure. What that does to a COI parser, and to a compliance rule that reads it.

• The Department of Labor's Open Data API: Eight Traps in apiprod.dol.gov

  Reading DOL enforcement data from code: a key that only works in the URL, a full page that looks complete, 204 for no match, and five more traps.

• The UFLPA Entity List as Data: 205 Rows, 187 Entities

  Screening names against DHS's UFLPA Entity List from code: entities repeated across category tables, aliases on one copy, dates per category, and a parser.

• trade.gov's Consolidated Screening List API: Nine Traps in the Search Endpoint

  Screening names with the Consolidated Screening List API: the one-page default, a size cap that fails silently, the offset ceiling, null types and more.

• USITC's HTS Export API: Nine Traps in the Tariff Schedule Data

  Reading the USITC tariff schedule export from code: a range bound that drops lines, blank rates that are not Free, double counts and six more traps.

• What a Certificate of Insurance Actually Proves

  A certificate of insurance is a dated summary, not the policy. What it establishes, what it cannot, and which checks it genuinely settles.

• What a screening API does not show you, and how to make it say so

  A no-match is only as good as what the screen actually read. Seven questions to ask of any screening response, the fields that answer them, and live examples.

• What Makes a Certificate of Insurance Deficient

  How a certificate of insurance fails a contract: low limits, no additional insured, no waiver of subrogation, missing coverage, or an expiry inside your window.

• When a Certificate Can't Be Read

  What a certificate-of-insurance API should return when a value is on the document but illegible, and why 'absent' and 'unreadable' must be different answers.

How these are written

Every claim about our own behavior on these pages is one the production API actually makes — field names and response shapes are taken from real responses, not invented to sound rigorous. No competitor is named on any of them: describing what we do and letting the reader draw the comparison is both the honest form and the only one we are willing to stand behind publicly.

None of it is legal, insurance, customs or regulatory advice. Aervik Labs is operated by EAC Ventures, LLC — see About for who is accountable and how corrections work.