Suspect Vendors Overview

Suspect Vendors

Identifying Vendors from the OFAC Sanctions List

Overview

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) oversees U.S. economic and trade sanctions. These sanctions target certain foreign countries, known terrorists, narcotics traffickers, and other threats. OFAC strongly encourages companies to have a sanction compliance program that includes internal controls and auditing.

To ensure compliance with OFAC policies, invoices authorized for payment are checked against the OFAC Consolidated Screening List (CSL), which is a list of sanctioned individuals or entities maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Identify whether any of the provided vendors are on the OFAC CSL.

Objective

Determine whether any of the vendors are on the OFAC CSL. Create a single output file with all of the vendors that are on the list separated into three tabs based on the vendor’s status.

Additional note: In a real-world process we would want to check for names that are similar but slightly different (think Fred vs. Freddy). In this example, exact matches are all we are looking for, but in some instances companies might want to utilize fuzzy matching to identify pairs that are close but not exact.

Processes

1. Pull in the Vendors.yxdb file, clean the names by removing punctuation and standardizing the case, and ensure there is only one record for each Vendor ID.

2. Pull in the Consolidated Screening List – Modified.yxdb, clean the names by removing punctuation and standardizing case, and add a unique identifier to each record.

3. Identify the vendors that are present on the OFAC list, and organize those vendors by date with the newest vendors first. Remove any fields that are entirely blank.

4. Output an Excel file of those vendors with a separate tab for each status.

Data Dictionary

Vendors.yxdb

Consolidated Screening List – Modified (CSL)

Government list modified to remove some extraneous columns