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Expanding LookBefore: A New Wave of Free Public Data Is Now Live

A new wave of free public data is now live in LookBefore: FDIC bank data, EPA environmental enforcement, Census building permits, and New York and Florida business registrations.

Published July 8, 2026 · 3 min read

A new wave of free public data is now live in LookBefore: FDIC bank data, EPA environmental enforcement history, Census building permits, and New York and Florida business-entity registrations. Each comes straight from the government agency that maintains it, so a search returns the official record itself. Together they let you check a federally insured bank, trace a facility’s environmental enforcement history, see building-permit activity in an area, or look up a business registered in New York or Florida.

What you can search for

Names

  • Federal court records (PACER via CourtListener)
  • SEC filings and insider trading filings
  • FEC campaign contributions
  • NPPES / NPI healthcare provider registry
  • CMS Open Payments — drug and device industry payments to providers
  • HHS-OIG LEIE and SAM.gov exclusions
  • Business registrations
  • State medical-board lookup links
  • Data-breach self-check (your own verified email address)

Organizations

  • SEC EDGAR company filings
  • FEC committee and candidate finances
  • CFPB consumer complaints
  • GLEIF LEI records — global legal-entity identifiers
  • IRS tax-exempt organization status
  • ProPublica nonprofit financials
  • College Scorecard — cost, debt, and outcome data for schools
  • USAspending federal awards and contracts
  • FDIC — federally insured bank and institution data
  • New York and Florida business-entity registrations

Products

  • CPSC recalls
  • NHTSA vehicle safety and recalls
  • FDA enforcement actions
  • Open Food Facts — ingredient and nutrition data

Places

  • Air quality (AirNow)
  • Census demographics
  • EPA-regulated facilities
  • EPA ECHO — environmental enforcement and compliance history
  • Census building permits
  • Restaurant inspections (seven metro areas)

Everything LookBefore searches is public data. It is already public — the difficulty is that it lives across dozens of separate government sites, each with its own search form and format, so finding a record usually means knowing which agency holds it and checking each one by hand. LookBefore brings those sources under a single search and returns the record itself, not a link to go look it up. The data was always public; putting it in one place is the part that’s new.

LookBefore is for personal, non-commercial public-records research. It is not a consumer report and may not be used for FCRA-covered decisions.