How we collect PAGA filing data

Who we are and how to reach us

PAGAlert monitors the California Department of Industrial Relations' public PAGA Case Search so that employers, law firms and their advisers can be told when a filing matching a name they follow appears.

Every request we make to the site carries a descriptive User-Agent containing support@pagalert.com. That address reaches a person. If our traffic is causing a problem, or if you would like us to stop or change how we collect, write to it and we will respond — we would much rather hear from you than be blocked.

What we collect

Only the structured metadata the search results already return: case and filing numbers, submission type, dates, employer name, city and ZIP, law firm and attorney names, and the count of impacted employees.

We do not download attachments, we do not extract text from documents, and we do not collect anything that is not returned by an ordinary search.

How often, and how gently

We do not poll per customer. One sweep covers every filing in a rolling window regardless of how many customers we have, so our request volume is flat as the business grows rather than proportional to it. Roughly a dozen requests per cycle, about 575 a day.

Between any two requests we wait at least eight seconds, coordinated centrally so that running more than one worker cannot double the rate. A sweep runs every thirty minutes, and an identical sweep can never re-run within fifteen however fast our queue drains.

We compare each result against what we already hold and write nothing when nothing has changed.

What happens when something goes wrong

If requests start failing, we stop. After a small number of consecutive failures collection halts completely and stays halted until a person investigates and restarts it — it does not retry its way back on its own, and it does not resume after a restart. A separate manual switch lets us stop all collection immediately.

This is deliberate. The risk we are most concerned about is our automation hammering a public agency's website while nobody is watching, so the system is built to fail closed and to require a human to turn it back on.

Public records, and asking us to remove a page

PAGA filings are public records and DIR publishes them. Our public directory republishes that metadata so it can be found by search.

We recognise that this is not costless for everyone. The employer named in a PAGA filing is sometimes a sole proprietor's own name, and a durable, indexed page under a person's name is a different thing from a record in a government database.

Anyone named on a page can ask — most often that is a sole proprietor, but the process is the same for a business. Email support@pagalert.com with the address of the page, your name and how the page concerns you, and a way to reach you. Every request is reviewed promptly by a person. We can remove an entity or case page from the public directory. When we do, the page stops existing for visitors and is removed from our sitemap — it does not become a page that says something was removed, because that would be its own disclosure.

Removal from our public directory does not remove the record from DIR, and does not affect what our customers see about filings they are already tracking.

If DIR's terms change

We checked for a robots.txt and for terms restricting automated access before building this, and found none that prohibited it. That is a finding about a particular day, not a permanent permission, so we re-check periodically and will change our behaviour if it changes.