The Office of Foreign Assets Control
The Office of Foreign Assets Control “OFAC” of the US Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, and those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. OFAC maintains a list of names and aliases of individuals, organizations and companies that the U.S. government has classified as potentially dangerous and a potential threat to national security.
Financial institutions, securities firms and insurance companies are required by law to block or freeze property, payment of any funds transfers and transactions with anyone on this list. Failure to comply with OFAC regulations may result in strict penalties.
For more information on U.S. government’s requirement, compliance, effective date and guidelines, please click here
CBC provides a service that matches names on credit reports against the OFAC list.
Although the OFAC list is publicly available, it is very difficult and labor intensive to manually search against these long lists. CBC uses the credit request input information (name, address, etc.) to search against the OFAC list.
What do I do if I get an “alert” message on an applicant?
If you have checked a name manually or by using software and find a match, you should do a little more research. Is it an exact name match, or very close? Is your customer located in the same general area as the SDN? If not, it may be a “false positive.” If there are many similarities, contact OFAC’s “hotline” at 1-800-540-6322