{
 "name": "VETS-4212 company rollup, 2025 filing cycle",
 "source": "U.S. Department of Labor VETS-4212 filings (422,831 establishment records)",
 "rollupMethod": "Establishment rows grouped by normalized employer name (case-folded, punctuation and common corporate suffixes removed, whitespace collapsed). The source carries NO employer identifier (no EIN/UEI/DUNS), so rollup by name is the only method available and is imperfect by construction: name_variants counts the distinct raw spellings merged into each row.",
 "geography": "hiring_states lists states of the employer's establishments (HlState, falling back to the filer state on single-establishment and headquarters forms). The filer's own CoState is the HEADQUARTERS state and must not be used as hiring geography.",
 "caveats": [
  "Protected-veteran self-identification is voluntary; every veteran figure understates.",
  "'Protected veteran' is a strict subset of 'veteran' (38 U.S.C. 4212 categories).",
  "One filing cycle; no trend inference is possible from this file.",
  "Some filings contain data-entry errors (e.g. transposed columns yielding 100% rates); no rows were removed."
 ],
 "license": "Free to use with attribution to LockLeed International (lockleed.com/vets-4212-field-guide).",
 "companies": 20340,
 "generated": "2026-08-08"
}