Why Open Payments shows a payment you never received, and what to do about it
Companies report what their systems attribute to you: a badge scan at a conference booth, your share of a group dinner, travel a third party booked in your name, research money attributed to you as principal investigator. A record like that can be disputed, but only on the program calendar.
A record you do not recognize is not necessarily fraud, and it is not necessarily wrong. Companies report what their systems attribute to you, not what reached your bank account. Most unrecognized records trace to one of five mechanics, and every one of them is worth checking, because the record is public, permanent by default, and feeds the disclosure forms you sign.
Conference booths scan badges. Depending on the company's tracking, a scan or a walk-through can be recorded as food or an educational item attributed to you, whether or not you took anything.
When a company hosts a dinner or lunch, its cost is typically divided across the recorded attendees. Your share of a group total appears as a payment to you, at a number you never saw on any receipt.
Speaker bureaus, travel agencies, and event organizers spend on your behalf: flights, hotels, honoraria. The company behind them reports it as a transfer of value to you, including indirect payments you never handled.
Research payments name a principal investigator. Money that went to your institution for a study can be attributed to you personally in the research file, even though it never touched your accounts.
A similar name, a transposed NPI, or a stale affiliation can put someone else's record under yours. This is the clearest dispute there is, and it still requires you to notice it.
What to do when you find one
Register in the CMS Open Payments system, review the records attributed to you, and dispute anything wrong. The dispute goes to the reporting company, and CMS does not mediate: the company decides whether to correct the record. The pre-publication window runs April 1 to May 15, the outer limit is December 31 of the year the record first published, and late corrections wait for a later refresh. The step-by-step process, and why so few physicians complete it, is on our how to dispute page. The official dates are at cms.gov.
Why checking once is not enough
The published data moves after you look at it. Corrections land in a January refresh, and prior program years change when companies restate them. The database is also keyed by company, so your complete record is scattered across every filer that ever reported your name. Checking yourself means repeating that assembly every year, on the program's calendar rather than yours.
See it before it becomes your problem
PayClear pulls everything companies have reported about you from the public record into one free ledger, adds what you capture from email and documents, and gives you a channel to confirm or dispute each record. When a disclosure form asks what you received, the answer is already assembled, and a record you never recognized is something you flagged instead of something a committee found.
Penalty figures are public statutory maximums; cost ranges are illustrative estimates from published compliance research. This is general information, not legal, tax, or compliance advice, and describes the reporting system generally, not any specific organization.
Figures verified 2026-09-07. Source: CMS Open Payments review and dispute guidance.
PayClear pulls what companies have already reported about you from the public federal record and puts it in one place, so you can check it against what you remember. Free for physicians. It takes your NPI to start.
Check your recordReporting on the other side of this? Ask for a walkthrough of your own public footprint.