A company can be on a US government list and it can mean five completely different things — an OFAC asset freeze, a BIS export-license denial, an NS-CMIC securities ban, a UFLPA import ban, or an FCC equipment-authorization bar. A field guide to telling the five regimes apart and why conflating them is wrong — the taxonomy behind SpyLedger and the sanctions-programs reference.
Writing · topic · 14 articles
Sanctions and illicit finance
OFAC and export-control regimes, restricted-party screening, money laundering, and financial-crime enforcement data.
The public corporate identity and government-designation status of 20 marquee spyware and mass-surveillance vendors (NSO Group, Intellexa, Hikvision, Huawei and more) — every designation rebuilt from a primary US/EU source and precisely typed: export control, sanction, equipment-authorization, or investment restriction.
Censorship and information control · Sanctions and illicit finance · Transparency and open data
US trade controls and the trade they govern usually live in separate datasets — OFAC’s sanctions lists, BIS’s export-enforcement record, and the Census foreign-trade statistics. This guide joins all three by country, HS commodity, and party so the rules, the violations, and the actual flow of goods line up in one view.
Economy and demographics · Sanctions and illicit finance · Engineering and infrastructure
The FDIC publishes every formal enforcement order it issues against state-chartered banks and the bankers who run them — roughly 10,900 cease-and-desist orders, civil money penalties, and prohibition orders that bar individuals from the industry for life. A field-level guide to the action types, the institution-affiliated-party concept, BSA/AML and safety-and-soundness causes, the join to the institutions directory, and a Python walkthrough of the public orders system.
Finance and markets · Sanctions and illicit finance · Federal data
Trade.gov Consolidated Screening List: The Federal Index of Who US Exporters Cannot Do Business With
Before any US company exports a good, transfers technology, or pays a foreign counterparty, it must check one list — the Consolidated Screening List, Trade.gov’s single feed of the restricted-party and sanctions lists from Commerce, State, and Treasury. This guide covers the entries, the legal authorities that bar dealing with them, and how a fuzzy-name search catches the aliases and transliterations that exact matching misses.
The Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control publishes every civil penalty settlement for sanctions violations — the banks, corporations, and individuals who conducted transactions with sanctioned countries or entities — with penalties ranging from thousands to over $1 billion, creating the most comprehensive public record of US sanctions enforcement.
Sanctions and illicit finance · Finance and markets · Federal data
IRS Criminal Investigation is the only federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over federal tax crimes — filing 2,500-3,000 criminal cases per year with a 90%+ conviction rate covering tax evasion, money laundering, and identity theft refund fraud.
Transparency and open data · Sanctions and illicit finance · Federal data
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List identifies companies whose goods are presumed to be produced with Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang — any imports from these entities are barred from US markets unless importers can rebut the presumption with clear and convincing evidence.
Sanctions and illicit finance · Federal data · Economy and demographics
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network publishes every Bank Secrecy Act civil enforcement action — civil money penalties, consent orders, and cease-and-desist orders against banks, money services businesses, and cryptocurrency exchanges for failures in anti-money laundering compliance programs.
The Bureau of Industry and Security's export enforcement records cover every administrative settlement, denial order, and criminal referral for violations of US export control law — the Export Administration Regulations that govern dual-use technology exports to adversary nations.
The OFAC SDN list (~8,000 entries) and Consolidated Sanctions List cover every individual, entity, and vessel that US persons are prohibited from transacting with — with civil penalties up to $1.3M per violation. Here is the full SDN record schema, all major sanctions programs, the 50% ownership rule, the Binance $4.3B landmark penalty, and how to parse and screen the XML list.
How we built a 0–100 compliance risk score across OFAC, SAM, OIG, CFPB, SEC, DOJ, FDIC, FINRA, CFTC, EPA, MSHA, FDA warning letters, PCAOB, UFLPA, and 15+ more lists in a single API call.
Federal data · Sanctions and illicit finance · Engineering and infrastructure
How the Federal Regulatory Data Hub ingests the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list — daily conditional GET with ETag, XML parsing across 12K SDN entries with alias explosion, name normalization pipeline, FTS5 + Jaro-Winkler three-pass screening, and p50 8ms / p99 28ms screening latency against the SDN list alone.
Federal data · Sanctions and illicit finance · Engineering and infrastructure
How the Federal Regulatory Data Hub manages alias proliferation across OFAC SDN, SEC EDGAR, and FinCEN BSA: a five-type alias taxonomy (AKA/FKA/NFE/PHONETIC/VESSEL), entity_aliases DDL with FTS5 virtual table and covering indexes, a normalization pipeline with iterative legal-suffix stripping and NFKD ASCII transliteration, double-Metaphone phonetic bucket generation, and a four-pass resolution pipeline (exact 71.4% → phonetic 88.2% → FTS5 96.1% → edit-distance 98.7% cumulative recall on 2.4M aliases).
Federal data · Engineering and infrastructure · Sanctions and illicit finance
All topics: the writing index.