Find Minnesota Roofing Contractors with Enforcement Actions

Say you handle claims for a regional insurer and a hailstorm has just gone through the Twin Cities suburbs. Within a week, assignment-of-benefits paperwork starts arriving from roofing companies you have never heard of. Storm-chasing outfits appear fast, work under names that change, and some of them are operating on a licence Minnesota has already revoked. You need to know which names on this week’s pile are carrying a disciplinary flag — before the adjuster schedules the inspection, not after the cheque clears.

The manual way, and what it costs

Minnesota’s Department of Labor & Industry doesn’t make you scrape a search form for this. It publishes the entire residential-contractor roster as a single nightly export — one CSV, about 12 MB, sitting at a public URL. There is no query interface on that file: you take all of it or none of it.

If you need this once, download it and use a spreadsheet. Open the CSV, filter the name column, filter the enforcement column, done — that is a genuinely reasonable afternoon and it costs nothing.

Where it stops being reasonable is repetition and scale. It is a 12 MB file with Windows-1252 encoding that Excel will cheerfully mangle if you double-click it, roughly two dozen columns of which you want six, and a licence-type field that is useless on its own because every row says “Residential Contractors” — the meaningful part is in a separate subtype column. Doing that dance weekly, during a storm season, for a pile of names that changes every Monday, is the point where a one-line call beats a manual re-import.

The faster way

Minnesota Contractor License Lookup & Verify (DLI) does the same search once and hands back every row at once.

{
  "query": "ROOFING",
  "enforcementOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 100
}

query is matched two ways: exactly against the licence number, or as a substring of the business and DBA names. ROOFING therefore sweeps every licensee trading with that word in its name — which, for storm-chaser screening, is most of them. enforcementOnly: true is the mode that makes this a screen rather than a directory: it drops every row without DLI’s enforcement flag set, so the run returns only licensees the department has taken action against. maxResults: 100 sets the ceiling on what a broad word can bring back, and since the whole roster is fetched once and filtered in memory, adding a second keyword run costs another call rather than another download.

What comes back

{
  "state": "MN",
  "license_number": "RR531208",
  "business_name": "RASSMUSSEN METAL ROOFING AND CONSTRUCTION INC (dba RMR CONSTRUCTION INC)",
  "person_name": null,
  "license_type": "Residential Contractors - Residential Roofer Contractor",
  "status": "REVOKED",
  "issue_date": "06/20/2005",
  "expiration_date": "03/31/2008",
  "city": "MINNEAPOLIS",
  "address": "5536 27TH AVE S",
  "zip_code": "55417",
  "phone": null,
  "enforcement_action": "1",
  "renewal_in_progress": null,
  "matched_by": "business_name",
  "source_url": "https://secure.doli.state.mn.us/ccld/data/MNDLILicRegCertExport_Residential_Contractors.csv"
}

Field	Example value	Meaning
state	MN	Licensee’s registered state (usually ‘MN’)
license_number	RR531208	DLI license number (e.g. BC807688)
business_name	RASSMUSSEN METAL ROOFING AND CONSTRUCTION INC (dba RMR CONSTRUCTION INC)	Licensed business name (DBA appended when present)
person_name	—	Individual’s name when the licensee is a person, else null
license_type	Residential Contractors - Residential Roofer Contractor	License type + subtype (e.g. ‘Residential Contractors - Qualifying Builder’)
status	REVOKED	License status (e.g. Issued, EXPIRED, REVOKED, SUSPENDED)

For the claims pile, enforcement_action is the flag that put the row in front of you and status is what tells you how far it went — REVOKED is a different conversation from a licence that merely lapsed. business_name is the field to read twice: the DBA is appended in parentheses, which is precisely how a storm chaser shows up under a name your adjuster doesn’t recognise while holding the licence you already flagged. license_type confirms the subtype is actually a roofer rather than a general residential builder who happens to have “roofing” in the trading name.

What you’d do with it

Keep the run as a weekly screening list: match business_name and its DBA against the week’s assignment paperwork, and route any hit to a manual review before the inspection is scheduled. Store license_number on the file so the next storm’s paperwork matches on the identifier rather than on a name that will have changed.

Worth knowing

The query matches names, not licence types. ROOFING finds licensees with that word in their business or DBA name — it does not return every roofer licence in the state. A roofer trading as “Northland Exteriors” will not appear in that run. Filter on license_type after the fact if the subtype is what you actually care about, and expect a name sweep to be a screen rather than a census.

enforcement_action is a flag, not a case file. It is DLI’s own published marker that an action exists. There is no case number, no date, no reason and no severity in it — the value is the raw flag the department publishes. Treat a hit as “go read the department’s record”, not as a finding.

Residential contractors only. This roster is DLI’s residential-contractor list — building contractors, remodelers, roofers, installers and related certificates. Electrical, plumbing and other trade boards are not in it.

It is a nightly snapshot, not a live registry. Results reflect the last published export, so an action recorded this morning may not appear until tomorrow’s file. Bond and insurance details are not part of this roster and are returned null.

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Run it yourself: How to run Minnesota Contractor License Lookup & Verify (DLI) walks the whole thing step by step.

Screening the same storm-chasing crews one state east, Verify a Michigan Contractor License by Number covers LARA’s registry. If the contractor turns out to be licensed somewhere else entirely, Multi-State Contractor & Trade License Lookup checks WA, OR, TX and CT from one input.