Authorities & Lists

OFAC

The Office of Foreign Assets Control, a U.S. Department of the Treasury agency that administers and enforces most U.S. economic and trade sanctions programs, including maintaining the SDN List.

SDN List

The Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List — OFAC's primary sanctions list, naming individuals and entities whose assets are blocked and with whom U.S. persons are generally prohibited from dealing.

Sectoral Sanctions Identifications (SSI) List

A separate OFAC list of persons subject to more limited, activity-specific restrictions (e.g. dealing in new debt or equity of a specified tenor) rather than a full SDN-style asset freeze.

EU Consolidated List

The European Union's single consolidated list of persons, groups and entities subject to EU financial sanctions.

UN Security Council Sanctions List

Sanctions lists maintained by UN Security Council committees (e.g. the 1267, 1718, and 1988 Committees) under binding UN resolutions, which UN member states are obligated to implement domestically.

Sanctions Programs

Blocking Sanctions

A sanctions program requiring a full freeze of a designated person's property and interests in property, and prohibiting virtually all dealings with them absent a license.

Sectoral Sanctions

A sanctions program restricting only specified categories of dealing (e.g. new debt/equity financing) with a designated person, who is not otherwise fully blocked — a narrower, more surgical restriction than a blocking program.

Specific License

An authorization issued to a named applicant, after individual application and review, permitting a particular otherwise-prohibited transaction or set of transactions.

General License

A standing authorization for a defined category of otherwise-prohibited transactions, available to anyone who meets its stated conditions without an individual application.

Secondary Sanctions

Measures that can expose non-U.S. (third-country) persons to sanctions risk, or restricted access to a jurisdiction's financial system, for engaging in significant transactions with a sanctioned party — extending a program's practical reach beyond direct jurisdictional nexus.

Screening Mechanics

Screening Algorithm

The matching logic a screening system applies when comparing a party name (or other identifier) against a sanctions list — ranging from exact string matching to fuzzy, phonetic, or transliteration-aware matching, each trading off missed true matches against false-positive volume differently.

Fuzzy Matching

A matching technique (e.g. Levenshtein edit distance) that flags names similar to, but not identical to, a list entry — catching misspellings, transliteration variants, or deliberately altered spellings that an exact match would miss.

Transliteration

The process of rendering a name originally written in one script (e.g. Cyrillic, Arabic) into another (typically Latin), which can legitimately produce multiple different correct spellings of the same underlying name — a major source of screening false positives and a vector for deliberate evasion.

Name Order Variance

The fact that given-name/family-name ordering and conventions differ across cultures and naming systems, which a screening algorithm must account for so a legitimate match in a different name order isn't missed.

Alert Disposition

True Match

A screening alert where investigation confirms the screened party is, in fact, the sanctioned person or entity named on the list.

False Positive

A screening alert where the screened party is, on investigation, determined NOT to be the sanctioned person or entity on the list — the match was coincidental (e.g. a shared common name) rather than the same real-world party.

List Hit

The initial, unresolved output of a screening system: a name (or other identifier) in a transaction or customer record scored as sufficiently similar to a list entry to warrant human review — not yet a determination of true match or false positive.

Related Risk Concepts

PEP

Politically Exposed Person — an individual holding (or closely associated with someone holding) a prominent public function, a risk factor related to, but distinct from, sanctions screening: PEP status can heighten scrutiny and inform enhanced due diligence, though not every PEP is sanctioned and not every sanctioned person is a PEP.

Asset Freezing

Segregating a designated person's assets and placing them beyond their use or control, without transferring ownership — the institution holds the assets blocked, pending further legal process, license, or resolution of the underlying sanctions designation.

De-risking

An institution's decision to wholesale exit or avoid entire categories of customers or business rather than manage sanctions/AML risk on a case-by-case basis — generally discouraged by regulators as a blunt response that can harm financial inclusion without improving actual compliance outcomes.

Wolfsberg Sanctions Screening Principles

Industry-recognized good-practice principles, published by the Wolfsberg Group, for how financial institutions should design, tune, and govern sanctions screening programs.

Evasion Typology

A recognized pattern by which a sanctioned party (or someone acting on their behalf) attempts to avoid detection by a screening program — e.g. name/transliteration manipulation, shell entities, structuring, or third-country routing — rather than an isolated, one-off anomaly.