ISTwatch- Using the OFAC List for Terrorist Identification

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administers a series of laws that impose economic sanctions against hostile targets to further U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives. OFAC acts under Presidential wartime and national emergency powers, as well as authority granted by specific legislation, to impose controls on transactions and freeze foreign assets under U.S. jurisdiction. Many of the sanctions are based on United Nations and other international mandates, are multilateral in scope, and involve close cooperation with allied governments.

The ultimate success of sanctions can only be insured by the active participation of every financial institution.

ISTwatch is a tool that not only simplifies the compliance process, but significantly improves the ability to correctly identify blocked entities.

In response to the terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and The Pentagon on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush by executive order required that all property and interests in property of those designated persons that are in the United States, or that hereafter come within the United States, or that hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") of the U.S. Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions against targeted foreign countries, terrorism sponsoring organizations, and international narcotics traffickers. In order to help facilitate the detection of blocked organizations and individuals, OFAC publishes a list. This list is in both ANSII text and PDF formats. After careful analysis of the different formatted files, it was discovered that they are not identical. There are some entries listed in the ANSII text files that are not found in the PDF format, and there are entries in the PDF format that do not correspond to the entries in the ANSII text files. That is why we have created an enhanced table containing all the entries from both sources.

Through the utilization of our advanced search and matching technology, we have successfully created a system that overcomes many significant variations while reducing the incident of false positives. False positives are people and/or organizations that should not be blocked but are flagged as potential blocked candidates.

OFAC posts new entities whenever a new individual or organization has been identified as a threat to the United States. Within twenty-four hours of posting, we make any and all updates available for inclusion into the ISTwatch software components.

IST Watch General Information