Archive for the ‘Unverified List’ Category


Aug

20

The Consolidated Screening List Isn’t


Posted by at 9:01 pm on August 20, 2014
Category: BISCompliance Programs and ProceduresDDTCDebarred ListDenied Party ListEntity ListOFACRussia SanctionsSanctionsSDN ListUnverified List

PortShip by USDA (cropped) via https://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/9715983721 [CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/]The U.S. Government, over at export.gov, provides a so-called Consolidated Screening List, which you might think would be a one-stop shopping list for your screening needs, something that might be useful if you or your company does not subscribe to or implement one of the commercial screening solutions. Unfortunately, the Consolidated Screening List doesn’t consolidate all the lists you should review and has other significant limitations.

The good news is that the list now does include the Foreign Sanctions Evaders List, which was not included for some time after the list was adopted by Treasury back in February of this year. The description of the list still does not mention the FSE list, but the entries on that list have been quietly added.

However, two other Treasury Department lists are still not included. The relatively new Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List is missing as action. U.S. persons are forbidden from engaging certain transactions with entities on this list, including providing credit in excess of ninety days. Part of the reason for this is probably that the “consolidated” list is infrequently updated. The last update of the list was almost two months ago, on June 26, 2014.

In addition, the Palestinian Legislative Council List, adopted back in 2006, is not included. U.S. financial institutions must reject (not block) transactions with people on the PLC list.

Not only is the “consolidated” list not complete or consolidated, but also it is dangerous to rely on it alone for another significant reason. The search page for the list only retrieves literal matches and does not allow address searching. In addition to searching the consolidated list, you should also rely on OFAC’s sanction list search tool. That tool uses, fairly successfully, “fuzzy logic” to retrieve similarly spelled names. Because many of the names on the list are transliterated versions of Arabic names, meaning that there are many alternate spellings, the “fuzzy logic” will be somewhat more successful in identifying alternate spellings.

Permalink Comments (1)

Bookmark and Share


Copyright © 2014 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)

Jun

19

The Unverified List Rises Again


Posted by at 7:01 pm on June 19, 2014
Category: BISRussia SanctionsUnverified List

By Daderot (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APatent_quote_-_United_States_Department_of_Commerce_-_DSC05103.JPGAs we reported back in January of this year, in a sort of Christmas amnesty, the Bureau of Industry and Security(“BIS”) freed all current prisoners on the Unverified List (“UVL”) and announced that it was building a bigger and more uncomfortable jail for the next set of UVL inmates. Under the rules of the new jail, all exports to parties on the UVL, regardless of the value of the export, would require an AES filing. If the export to the UVL party required a license, no license exceptions could be used. And, most importantly, UVL parties would have to sign a lengthy statement promising to obey the Export Administration Regulations, revealing the end use and end user of the item (including the address,  favorite ethnic food and Facebook password for each end user), committing to cooperate in all future end use checks and swearing on a religious book of choice that they would be home and in bed by 9:00 p.m. every night, no exceptions. (I exaggerate, of course, but the required statement is lengthy, contains most of the things I’ve listed and must be signed even if the U.S. exporter is planning to send a set of steak knives or other EAR99 item to the UVL party.)

On Monday, the gates of the new prison opened and 29 new UVL inmates were welcomed to the new and improved UVL correctional facility. I scanned the list and did not see any former entities on the UVL on this new list, although it’s possible I might have missed a few. The announcement of the new list does not reveal the particular crimes committed by each entity on the list but under BIS rules they would have had to have failed an end-use check in one way or other, either by not submitting to it, not being where they were supposed to be, or not being able to explain what happened to an item previously exported to them.

Five Russian companies were added to the UVL, and this was probably unconnected to recent sanctions on Russia over the Crimea and Ukraine issues. Given that BIS has suspended issuing licenses for Russia, being on the list may be somewhat more burdensome for the Russian parties.  Although licenses might in theory be available as a fall-back option to UVL parties outside Russia who could no longer use license exceptions, this fall-back option will not be available to the Russian entities on the UVL.

Permalink Comments (3)

Bookmark and Share


Copyright © 2014 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)