Screening 200 bank vendors against the OFAC SDN list manually — looking up each company name in the Treasury's search tool — takes hours and happens inconsistently. The SDN list updates multiple times per week. A manual check done at annual review is out of date within days. Automated daily OFAC screening of the entire vendor portfolio is achievable with free government APIs and takes under 5 minutes to run for portfolios of up to 500 vendors.
The OFAC Sanctions List Service API
The US Treasury maintains the OFAC Sanctions List Service at sanctionslistservice.ofac.treas.gov. The API accepts queries with an entity name and returns a match confidence score against every entry on the consolidated sanctions list — which includes the SDN list plus other OFAC sanctions programs. The API is free, requires no authentication for basic queries, and returns structured JSON results that can be processed automatically.
Name Matching and False Positives
OFAC name matching requires handling for common name collisions. A vendor named "Global Logistics LLC" matching a low-confidence result for an SDN entity with a similar name requires human review — the AI cannot make the final determination on a potential sanctions match. The screening system should flag any match above a configured confidence threshold for compliance officer review, with the match details and the SDN entry information provided for evaluation. The compliance officer reviews the flag and documents the disposition.
What the Screening Log Looks Like
A daily OFAC screening log for a 200-vendor portfolio shows: vendor name, date screened, result (clear or potential match), confidence score if any match was found, and disposition notes if a potential match required human review. This log is the documentation an examiner is asking for when they say "show me your OFAC vendor screening records." The Banking Vendor Risk AI Agent generates this log automatically every day and includes it in the Google Sheets audit trail from the first scan.