OFAC Check
Free fuzzy-match search against the U.S. Treasury Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. Type a company, person, or vessel name; FedBase returns sanctions hits with the originating program and a trigram-similarity score so you can decide whether the result is your counterparty or a name collision.
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What is an OFAC check?
An OFAC check (or OFAC screening) is a comparison of a person, company, or vessel name against the sanctions lists maintained by the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control. The most prominent of these is the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list, which currently names roughly 18,700 entries across 230+ sanctions programs (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, narcotics traffickers, foreign terrorists, Russia-Ukraine designations under E.O. 14024, and so on). When a match is found, U.S. persons are generally prohibited from transacting with the entity, and any U.S.-touching assets must be blocked.
OFAC enforcement is strict liability: civil penalties don't require intent. The maximum penalty per violation is the greater of ~$356,579 or twice the underlying transaction value, and willful violations are criminal. That's why an OFAC check is a routine step in M&A diligence, KYC onboarding, lending, payments, freight forwarding, and high-value wire transfers — and why most regulated firms re-screen counterparties on a recurring schedule.
Frequently asked questions
What is an OFAC check?
An OFAC check is a screening of a person, company, or vessel against the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions lists — most importantly the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list. A match means the entity is sanctioned: U.S. persons are generally prohibited from doing business with them, and any U.S.-touching assets must be blocked.
Why do I need to run an OFAC check?
OFAC enforces strict-liability sanctions. Banks, lenders, payment processors, real-estate closers, M&A acquirers, and many SaaS companies are required to screen counterparties before transacting. Civil penalties for an SDN-list violation can reach the greater of $356,579 or twice the value of the underlying transaction, per violation, and willful violations carry criminal exposure.
What does "OFAC check" mean in everyday business?
It means: type the counterparty's legal name, run it against the SDN list (and ideally Sectoral Sanctions, Non-SDN Palestinian Legislative Council, FSE, and consolidated lists), document the result, and re-run the check whenever the relationship is material. A "no match" verdict at the time of transaction is what regulators look for in an examination.
How does FedBase's OFAC check work?
FedBase ingests the official OFAC SDN CSV daily, normalizes each name (lowercasing, stripping business suffixes like Inc/LLC/Corp, removing punctuation), and stores it with a Postgres pg_trgm trigram index. When you submit a query, we compute the trigram similarity between your normalized query and every SDN name; matches with similarity ≥ 0.50 are returned, ordered by closest fit. Similarity ≥ 0.95 is flagged as exact_match, 0.80–0.94 as likely_match, 0.50–0.79 as possible_match.
Is FedBase's OFAC check authoritative for compliance?
No single tool is. The authoritative source is OFAC itself — sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov for the official lookup, plus the SDN consolidated list. FedBase mirrors the same upstream data refreshed daily and is suitable for internal screening, lead-stage diligence, and acquisition workflows, but a regulated financial institution should still document a hit (or a clean result) using OFAC's own search UI plus an internal compliance review.
What's the difference between an OFAC check and a background check?
A background check screens a person's identity, criminal record, employment history, and credit. An OFAC check screens a name against U.S. Treasury sanctions lists only. They are complementary: a clean background check does not imply a clean OFAC result, and vice versa. The two are run for different legal reasons (FCRA / employment vs. sanctions / international finance).
How often is the SDN list updated?
OFAC publishes updates whenever a new designation, delisting, or amendment is signed — in practice, several times per week, sometimes daily during active sanctions cycles (Russia-Ukraine, Iran, narcotics, terrorism). FedBase's ofac-daily worker checks the Treasury CSV's Last-Modified header every 24 hours and re-imports only when it changes.
Can I check a vessel or aircraft with FedBase?
Yes. The SDN list includes sanctioned vessels (with IMO numbers, flags, tonnage) and aircraft alongside individuals and entities. Type the vessel name or registration into the search above; if it appears as a designated vessel, the result will show sdn_type = "Vessel" with the program (e.g., RUSSIA-EO14024, IRAN, NPWMD).
Source & methodology
- Source: U.S. Treasury OFAC — SDN CSV
- Snapshot date: 2026-05-01
- Retrieved: 2026-05-02
- Last verified: 2026-05-04
- Refresh cadence: daily (HEAD/Last-Modified guard)
- Match algorithm: Postgres pg_trgm trigram similarity on normalized SDN name (lowercase, business suffixes stripped, punctuation removed); cutoff 0.50.