@pipeworx/dol-m1 — Form M-1 (MEWA/AHP) filings

U.S. Department of Labor Form M-1 filings — the federal report filed by multiple employer welfare arrangements (MEWAs) and association health plans (AHPs) that pool health coverage across unrelated employers. form5500 already covers annual plan/pension financial returns, and ebsa covers EBSA's own civil-penalty enforcement record against deficient Form 5500 filers — this is a third, unrelated filer population and form.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1863+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

Related MCP server: mcp-form5500

Auth

Keyless. No login, no API key, no approval step.

Data sources

• U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration — Form M-1 Filings Database. 17,313 filings live as of 2026-10-18, plan years 2003-2025.

Gotchas

• Reverse-engineered, not documented. This is a public search tool, not a published REST API — the endpoint shape came from the search page's own bundled JavaScript (m1search.build_url), not from any API docs. It is still a plain, publicly reachable GET with no auth; nothing here needs a browser or a session.

• The dropdown filters do not accept an empty string the way a free-text field does. Plan year and filing type default to "ALL", and the stop-loss/fully-insured flags default to "0" ("Any") in the real form. Sending "" for any of those four throws an unhandled server exception — the endpoint answers HTTP 500 with a full HTML error page, not a structured error. This pack always sends the correct default.

• Headquarters state and coverage state are different facets, not aliases. hq_state filters where the MEWA is based; coverage_state filters where it offers coverage — a MEWA headquartered in New Jersey can show up filtered by coverage_state: "NY" with hq_state: "NJ" on its own row. Verified live.

• limit has an undocumented cap of 100, and it does not clamp or error past that — it silently resets to a 25-row default. Measured live: limit=100 returns 100 rows, limit=101 returns 25. This pack clamps its own limit argument to 1-100 before calling, so a caller's limit: 500 cannot trigger the silent fallback.

• A zero-match query is a clean HTTP 200 with {"total":0,"rows":[]} — not an error. This pack turns that into { found: false, reason: "no_matching_filings", filters_applied: {...} } rather than passing through a bare [].

• The FilingType field on each returned row does not reliably reflect the filing_type request filter — every row observed across every filing-type query (Amended, Extension, Regular Filing, Registration) came back FilingType: 0. The request-side filter itself works (verified live: filtering narrows the total count correctly per type); only the echoed field is unreliable, so it is left out of the shaped output.

• The administrator/sponsor name can be an individual, not a business. For small MEWAs the Form M-1 administrator of record is sometimes a natural person's own name — this is the DOL's own mandatory public-filing field, passed through exactly as the federal filing discloses it, the same way form5500 and ebsa already pass through their own sponsor fields.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dol-m1": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/dol-m1/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/dol-m1/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1863+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/dol_m1_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"hq_state":"TX","plan_year":2024,"limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/dol_m1_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-dol-m1 is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/dol-m1/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dol-m1": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-dol-m1"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Dol M1 data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT