The U.S. Government, over at export.gov, provides a so-called Consolidated Screening List, which you might think would be a one-stop shopping list for your screening needs, something that might be useful if you or your company does not subscribe to or implement one of the commercial screening solutions. Unfortunately, the Consolidated Screening List doesn’t consolidate all the lists you should review and has other significant limitations.

The good news is that the list now does include the Foreign Sanctions Evaders List, which was not included for some time after the list was adopted by Treasury back in February of this year. The description of the list still does not mention the FSE list, but the entries on that list have been quietly added.

However, two other Treasury Department lists are still not included. The relatively new Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List is missing as action. U.S. persons are forbidden from engaging certain transactions with entities on this list, including providing credit in excess of ninety days. Part of the reason for this is probably that the “consolidated” list is infrequently updated. The last update of the list was almost two months ago, on June 26, 2014.

In addition, the Palestinian Legislative Council List, adopted back in 2006, is not included. U.S. financial institutions must reject (not block) transactions with people on the PLC list.

Not only is the “consolidated” list not complete or consolidated, but also it is dangerous to rely on it alone for another significant reason. The search page for the list only retrieves literal matches and does not allow address searching. In addition to searching the consolidated list, you should also rely on OFAC’s sanction list search tool. That tool uses, fairly successfully, “fuzzy logic” to retrieve similarly spelled names. Because many of the names on the list are transliterated versions of Arabic names, meaning that there are many alternate spellings, the “fuzzy logic” will be somewhat more successful in identifying alternate spellings.