Understanding the Financial Sanctions Service

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals, as well as the mandates of the United Nations and other international organizations.

The targets of these sanctions—Specially Designated Nationals (SDN)—are individuals or entities that engage in terrorism, international narcotics trafficking, and activities that are related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The OFAC enforces these sanctions against SDNs by freezing their assets under U.S. jurisdiction and by controlling their transactions.

PeopleSoft enables users to download the list of SDNs from the OFAC and the European Union, as well as enterprise sources. Once installed, users can manually search the list to validate such entities as banks, payees, and suppliers. In addition to manual searches, users of PeopleSoft Cash Management, Financial Gateway, Order Management, and Payables can enable searches to be performed automatically when processing transactions. If, for example, a name or bank matches one that is on the SDN list, these applications provide a process for administrators to verify that the match is correct and prevent any financial transactions from occurring with that individual or entity or approve the transaction if the match proves to be a false positive.

The SDN search function can also use third-party applications that can accept XML-based search requests and create XML messages containing the search results using Web services protocol.