Screen using Middesk’s OFAC sanctions database, imported directly from OFAC’s sanctions lists, to know which businesses and people to avoid associating with in B2B relationships.
Business Profiles
Added in Q3
Update frequency
Business registries
An OFAC screening tool is a piece of software that checks the names of businesses – including associated people and countries – against US Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions lists. It then reports whether each entity’s name appeared on one of those sanctions lists or not.
OFAC issues lists of entities engaged in activities counter to US national security and foreign policy interests. Any US citizen or business is legally forbidden from associating with entities on OFAC’s lists.
Go to your dashboard in Middesk and select the Business Verification – Verify tool.
Enter a business’s name and address, along with (optionally) a list of people associated with the business. Then run the search.
Select to view the Consolidated OFAC Screening report.
Review the report to determine if the business, or anyone associated with it, is on an OFAC sanctions list.
Running a business verification search with Middesk can also find other pieces of information needed for compliance purposes.
Middesk Compliance Data Sources
Data You Can Access
What Do You Need to Know?
Watchlist hits & PEP screening
Is the business, its home country, or any of its associated people on one of OFAC’s sanctions lists or another US watchlist?
Depending on the specific list an entity matches against, there may be conditions on dealing with that entity, or association with it may be disallowed entirely.
Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO)
Am I aware of who truly owns the business I want to form a relationship with, and did the business provide the correct information regarding this?
Business industry classification (NAICS, SIC)
Am I aware of what kinds of products and services the business provides?
Business license
Is the business in good standing with all local, state, and federal regulatory boards?
Business documents
Can I see the business’s formation documents, such as Articles of Incorporation and Certificate of Good Standing, to verify the business is legitimate?
Business name, address, & phone number
Does the business’s basic registration information match across all required government and regulatory agency filings?
EIN / Business Tax ID
Is the business registered to file taxes with the IRS with a valid and unique ID number?
Liens & litigations
Does this business have any litigations or liens filed against them?
Bankruptcy data
Has this business filed for bankruptcy, and does that present a financial risk to my company?
OFAC sanctions restrictions have to be followed by all US businesses, regardless of which industry they’re in.
Many fintechs want to grow as quickly as possible, but that shouldn’t mean resorting to dealing with sanctioned entities. Having an automated OFAC sanctions list search tool allows fintechs to check whether the clients and partners they’re taking on are legitimate.
Criminals can commit insurance fraud as part of other financial crimes, such as money laundering, terrorism financing, and WMD proliferation financing. A quick OFAC search using Middesk’s system will tell insurers who they shouldn’t deal with.
A key step in preventing money laundering and other serious financial crimes is cutting off the means for criminals to move money around. By using an OFAC search tool, banks can quickly identify and block sanctioned individuals and businesses.
Like banks, lenders also don’t want to be providing financial resources to known money launderers, terrorists, and other criminals. A quick OFAC lookup with Middesk’s tool will tell a lender if an applicant should be immediately denied.
Keep businesses being used as fronts for financial crime out of your commerce hub. Quickly check applicant businesses against OFAC’s lists to protect yourself and your marketplace’s consumers from unwittingly aiding criminals.
Payment providers for marketplaces also want to make sure they aren’t being used as vehicles for money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crime. Rapid OFAC screening helps maintain trust between payment platforms, merchants, consumers, and marketplace managers.
Screen against all OFAC sanctions lists, not just the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. If a business customer, its home country, or an associated person is sanctioned by the US in any way, you’ll know about it.
Middesk retrieves data directly from OFAC’s official consolidated sanctions lists on a daily basis. So you can rest assured you’re getting fresh, accurate information to conduct KYB with.
Middesk covers not just OFAC’s lists, but also watchlists from the State Department and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). This helps you know not only which entities are illegal to deal with, but also which ones are high-risk and may have special conditions on associating with them.
Forget having to manually screen businesses and their associated people, one by one, through the OFAC website. Middesk’s OFAC tool allows you to check a business and its associated people all at once, against all of OFAC’s lists at once.
Middesk’s Business Verification isn’t just an OFAC SDN search tool. It also screens against all other OFAC sanctions lists, as well as watchlists from the State Department and the BIS.
Middesk refreshes its US watchlist data daily, so you’ll be updated at the start of each day as to whether a business (or any of its associated people) has been added to a watchlist.
Middesk offers screening options to reduce false positives, such as fuzzy matching, date of birth filtering, and screening against specific watchlists or agencies.
In addition to hits on OFAC sanctions lists and other US watchlists, Middesk’s Business Verification can check other potential risk factors: industry classifications, litigations, bankruptcies, etc.
OFAC’s lists name people, businesses, and countries that have posed (or are posing) serious threats to US national security, foreign relations, or economic policy. So in addition to being high-risk, these entities have conditions or even prohibitions on dealing with them. If you fail to comply with these restrictions, you can face criminal penalties and other consequences.
Middesk retrieves consolidated OFAC sanctions list data directly from the US Department of the Treasury, which oversees the Office of Foreign Assets Control. It also retrieves other watchlist data from the State Department and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS).
You can, but there are some major downsides to doing things this way. One is that you can only run one search at a time, which is highly inefficient if you have a large number of business customers (not to mention having to search for their associated people as well).
Another is that OFAC’s tool has limited support for varying name formats (e.g. alternate spellings, nicknames/aliases, abbreviations, contractions, and acronyms), so you may need to run the same search multiple times to ensure you get (or don’t get) a match. Again, this is overly time-consuming, especially if you need to do this for hundreds (or potentially thousands) of entities.
Once you have an account with us and have purchased our Business Verification solution, just log into your dashboard and select the Business Verification – Verify tool. Then enter a business’s name and address, along with (optionally) a list of people associated with the business, and run the search. When the search is done, select the Consolidated OFAC Screening report and review it at your leisure. It’s a fairly simple process that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
Get started with our OFAC list search tool today