OFAC Watchlist Screens

Description

Watchlist entities draw from the following publications of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC):

Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN)
Consolidated Sanctions List (Non-SDN): this includes the Foreign Sanctions Evaders List (FSE), Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List (SSI), Palestinian Legislative Council List (PLC), List of Foreign Financial Institutions Subject to Correspondent Account or Payable-Through Account Sanctions (CAPTA), Non-SDN Menu-Based Sanctions List (NS-MBS), and the Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List (NS-CMIC).

Enigma's OFAC screen looks up all people and addresses on all registrations objects associated with a business as well as additional user inputs on the persons_to_screen object against all lists above.

Child attributes (and data file structure)

Within a file layout, the 0 indicates the depth with an array, e.g. the 0th element of the watchlist flag array. Additional elements will have a 1, 2, etc. These numbers appear after the initial watchlist_ prefix.

Attribute	Description
watchlists_match_count	The number of entities named similarly to entities on the OFAC lists
watchlists_match_confidence	Match confidence - by default this is set at a >0.85 score threshold corresponding to a 99.97% true positive rate and 0.4% false positive rate when DOB is included as part of the input, and a 99.97% true positive rate and 5% false positive rate when no DOB is not included.
watchlists_watchlist_entity_watchlist_name	Name of the watchlist entity
watchlists_watchlist_entity_full_name	Name of the watchlist entity full name
watchlists_watchlist_entity_organization_name	Name of the watchlist entity organization
watchlists_watchlist_entity_dob	Date of birth of the watchlist entity
watchlists_watchlist_entity_full_address	Full legal address of the watchlist entity

JSON sample

"watchlists": 
	[{
    "enigma_id": "ofac/sdn/11161737",
    "match_confidence": 1.0,
    "matched_fields": {
			"person.first_name": "Joe", 
			"person.last_name": "Smith"
		},
		"watchlist_entity": {
			"watchlist_name": "SDN",
			"entity_type": "person",
			"full_name": "Joe Smith",
			"organization_name": null,
			"dob": null,
			"full_address":  null
		}
	]
}

Coverage

Enigma should have complete coverage over watchlist entities on the OFAC list. The specific statistics against a test set are as follows:

99.97% true positive rate and 0.4% false positive rate when DOB on persons to screen is used
99.97% true positive rate and 5% false positive rate when no DOB on persons to screen is used.

Data sources

Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN)
Consolidated Sanctions List (Non-SDN)

Methodology

Enigma takes as inputs persons on the registration filing, the legal entity name, and the names and DOBs inputted by the user in the persons_to_screen object.
Each name provided is split into trigrams. Trigram overlap calculation is performed between the submitted name and the name appearing on the sanctions list.
A default threshold of >0.8 is assigned to maximize the true positive rate while minimizing the false positive rate.
- The score is defined as where the numerator is the number of matching trigrams between the input string and the string appearing on the watchlist.
- The denominator is geometric mean of the number of trigrams in the inputted entity and the candidate entity.