Screening against OFAC SDN list

7 min read Updated February 16, 2026

What Is OFAC Screening?

OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) maintains the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list — a database of individuals, companies, and entities sanctioned by the US government. US persons are prohibited from transacting with anyone on this list.

The ComplianceGrid Approach

Our /v1/compliance/restricted-party-screening endpoint screens parties against the SDN list and other government watchlists using multi-algorithm fuzzy matching, alias resolution, and configurable confidence thresholds.

Basic Screening Request

bash

curl -X POST https://api.compliancegrid.ai/v1/compliance/restricted-party-screening \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CG_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "parties": [{
      "name": "Huawei Technologies",
      "country": "CN",
      "type": "CONSIGNEE"
    }]
  }'

Understanding Results

The response includes:

overallResult — CLEAR, MATCH, or POTENTIAL_MATCH
totalMatches — Number of watchlist entries that matched
matchScore — Confidence score (0–100) for each match
matchedList — Which specific list the match was found on (SDN, Entity List, etc.)
listsScreened — All lists that were checked

Lists Screened

ComplianceGrid screens against multiple lists in a single call:

OFAC SDN (Specially Designated Nationals)
OFAC Consolidated Non-SDN
BIS Entity List
BIS Denied Persons List
BIS Unverified List
DTC Debarred Parties
EU Consolidated Sanctions
UN Security Council Sanctions

Threshold Recommendations

Threshold	Risk Profile	Use Case
95+	Low sensitivity	Low-value, low-risk transactions
85–94	Standard	Most compliance programs
70–84	High sensitivity	High-risk industries, sanctions-heavy regions

Audit Trail

Every screening call generates an audit record that includes the request, response, timestamp, and API key used. These records are available for 7 years via the compliance audit endpoint, meeting regulatory retention requirements.

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