I have seen many things in my line of work, but the particular haunt of this one is “common interest.” The Department of Labor calls these agreements a lawful way to share confidential information—then, in an Inspector General audit, DOL’s own paperwork starts acting like it’s allergic to accountability.
The audit is OIG Report 09-26-001-08-001, issued June 30, 2026. It focused on a defined period (Jan. 1, 2023, through June 30, 2025) and looked at “common interest agreements” used across DOL components—specifically identifying 48 agreements in that window, with seven tied to EBSA and forty-one tied to the Wage and Hour Division.
From those 48, the OIG reviewed a sample of 13, using an explicit compile-then-select approach—part random, part judgmental selection. That’s the kind of methodology you can show auditors, managers, and, if necessary, a judge: “We didn’t just guess.” Yet the findings read less like “we found a few bad apples” and more like “we never built the basket that tells you how many apples exist.”
According to the OIG, DOL lacked sufficient formal policies or procedures, had weak internal coordination, and—most crucially for anyone who wants oversight beyond vibes—did not have adequate tracking mechanisms to determine, with confidence, how many agreements existed across the relevant universe. And then the plot twist: DOL agreed to all eight recommendations aimed at fixing the control and accountability gaps.
So here’s the human stake, in plain language. EBSA and WHD exist to enforce worker protections, not to play administrative hide-and-seek with sensitive information-sharing arrangements. When the watchdog says the filing system can’t reliably tell you what’s in the folder, that’s not a theoretical problem—it’s the enforcement equivalent of being asked to prove a negative. The paperwork can reproduce; the tracking can’t. The document coughed; Exhibit A had a pulse; and still the agency’s answer was “trust us, we’ll improve.”
