What Is An OFAC Check?
The Office of Foreign Assets Control or OFAC is a federal agency administered by the U.S. Treasury Department. It’s a regulatory body that maintains a list of all entities and individuals who have been sanctioned by the U.S. for non-compliance.
Usually, entities and persons that engage in narcotic drugs trafficking, restricted arms exports, export of mass destruction material, money laundering, terrorism financing, and more are targeted by OFAC. These targeted profiles are sanctioned for non-compliance. This information is made available to the public to help the business and civil ecosystems to be aware of the non-compliant profiles.
An OFAC check enables businesses in particular to verify the real identities of profiles with reliable, authorized data lists. It additionally helps businesses with assessing the risk quotient of the profile, helping you articulate the repercussions of onboarding a high-risk profile.
OFAC checks play a significant role in compliance and help businesses identify if a profile has been sanctioned by the OFAC.
Let’s learn more about this in detail as follows.
What Is An OFAC Check?
The OFAC check is a screening procedure that allows you to verify the real identities of a profile against the authorized data lists of the OFAC as published under a variety of sanction programs. Individuals and entities listed in the OFAC data lists are restricted from regular commercial conduct.
This means businesses are restricted from engaging in any kind of conduct with the sanctioned profiles. Any disregard of these sanctions will be deemed as sanction violations, which would result in civil liabilities and hefty penalties.
What Is Sanction Screening?
Sanction screening, a terminology that defines the sanction check process, is a procedure through which you can validate and check if an entity or a person has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department.
If your business is hiring an employee for a high-level position, such as the CEO or COO, you are required to perform due diligence to ensure that the profile poses no risk to the company.
Sanction screening essentially helps you check if the profile you plan on onboarding poses any risk. Hiring a high-risk profile could be catastrophic for the financial, reputational, and regulatory objectives of the business.
So, sanction screening helps you with validating the real identities to conclude the credibility of the profile and verify the legitimacy of the profile.
How Does OFAC Sanction Screening Help Businesses?
Sanction screening enables the following for businesses.
- Accelerates identity validation
- Prevents and reduces risks associated with sanction violations
- Improves account opening process
- Ascertains KYC compliance
- Streamlines the customer identification process (CIP)
- Enables due diligence with authoritative evidence
- Reduces the probability of onboarding high-risk profiles
Screen Profiles With OFAC Sanction Screening Confidently With Compliancely
Compliancely, a real-time identity verification infrastructure provides dynamic OFAC sanction screening solutions to enterprise industries. With our real-time identity checks, businesses can verify millions of profiles within seconds with accuracy.
Our data lists are in ‘sync’ with the source data lists (OFAC and U.S. Treasury Department), bringing you the best of both worlds – time-efficient solutions that deliver accuracy as and when you need them.
What’s more? We re-screen your profiles as and when the source data lists are updated. This allows you to obtain accurate information at all times.
Our API service further enhances this experience by scaling up our identity verification checks per your customized requirements.
