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.
