Anatomy of a sanctions list
What a sanctions list entry actually contains — names, aliases, birth data, documents, and programme tags — and why every field matters for matching.
L0 Explain simply
An everyday analogy: a list entry is like a detailed missing-person poster. It gives the person's name — and every other name they are known by — plus their date and place of birth, nationality, known addresses, and document numbers, and it says which case the poster belongs to. A screening system is the person at the gate comparing every visitor against the posters. The richer the poster, the easier it is to tell a dangerous match from an innocent lookalike who happens to share a name. A poster with only a common name and nothing else will stop many innocent visitors; a poster with a birthdate and a passport number lets the gatekeeper wave the namesakes through with confidence.
L1 Core concepts
A list entry describes one designated party — an individual, entity, vessel, or aircraft. Its typical contents: a primary name; aliases (a.k.a. entries), often graded by quality, plus former names; secondary identifiers such as date and place of birth, nationality, and gender for individuals, or registration numbers for entities; documents like passport and national ID numbers; addresses; a programme or regime tag saying which sanctions measure the entry belongs to; a listing date; and free-text narrative with reasons and additional detail. Entries also carry a unique reference number assigned by the issuer. Names are frequently provided in original script as well as Latin transliteration, which matters enormously for matching quality.
L2 Practitioner view
Practitioners read entries with matching consequences in mind. A strong entry — full name, original script, birthdate, passport — supports confident decisions in both directions: catching the real target and clearing the namesakes. A thin entry — one common name, no identifiers — will alert constantly and can rarely be discounted, so investigators handle its hits differently. Alias quality matters: issuers mark some aliases as weak or low quality, and many institutions configure those to enrich an investigation rather than trigger alerts on their own, a documented risk decision. The programme tag decides what a confirmed match would even mean, since obligations differ by regime. And entity entries behave differently from individual ones: no birthdate, more name variation, and identifiers like registration numbers that customer records often lack.
L3 Technical details
Concrete structures: the UN consolidated list gives each entry a permanent reference number whose prefix encodes the regime — for example entries beginning QDi belong to the ISIL and Al-Qaida regime — and splits individual names across up to four name fields to cope with different naming conventions, alongside original-script versions. Aliases are explicitly graded good or low quality. OFAC's SDN List carries programme tags per entry, entity records with registration identifiers, and vessel details for maritime entries; OFAC also publishes separate non-SDN lists whose consequences differ. EU and UK consolidated files have their own schemas with comparable content. Screening systems normalise all of this into a common internal format — and every normalisation choice, such as how the four UN name fields are joined, changes what the matcher can see.
Sources & standards2
- Official requirement
United Nations Security Council Consolidated List ↗ — United Nations Security Council · List data: name fields, a.k.a. quality grading, permanent reference numbers
Published in XML, HTML, and PDF formats and updated as committees act; each name is subject to the measures of its specific sanctions committee, not one uniform regime.
- Official requirement
Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List) ↗ — US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control · SDN entry content and programme tags
Updated continuously; machine-readable formats are distributed via OFAC's Sanctions List Service. Every list entry appearing in this site's examples is fictional.
L4 Standards & sources
The authoritative record is the issuing authority's own publication: the UN consolidated list as published by the Security Council, OFAC's SDN List and its published data files, the EU consolidated list, and the UK list published by OFSI. Everything downstream — vendor watchlists, internal copies, this topic — is derived, and field meanings can shift as issuers revise their schemas, so a matching question should always be settled against the current official file rather than a cached copy. Field inventories summarised here reflect the published list documentation as checked during authoring; issuers add and restructure fields over time. Where a hit will drive a freeze or rejection decision, investigators confirm the entry on the issuer's site, including the narrative and any amendments, before treating the data as final.
Sources & standards3
- Official requirement
United Nations Security Council Consolidated List ↗ — United Nations Security Council · Consolidated list data specification: names, aliases, identifiers, reference numbers
Published in XML, HTML, and PDF formats and updated as committees act; each name is subject to the measures of its specific sanctions committee, not one uniform regime.
- Official requirement
Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List) ↗ — US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control · SDN List entries and published data files
Updated continuously; machine-readable formats are distributed via OFAC's Sanctions List Service. Every list entry appearing in this site's examples is fictional.
- Official requirement
Consolidated list of persons, groups and entities subject to EU financial sanctions ↗ — European Commission · EU consolidated financial sanctions list entry content
Covers only financial sanctions consisting of asset freezes; the EU Sanctions Map (sanctionsmap.eu) documents the broader restrictive-measure regimes.
Sources for this topic4
- Official requirement
United Nations Security Council Consolidated List ↗ — United Nations Security Council · United Nations Security Council Consolidated List
Published in XML, HTML, and PDF formats and updated as committees act; each name is subject to the measures of its specific sanctions committee, not one uniform regime.
- Official requirement
Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List) ↗ — US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control · Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List
Updated continuously; machine-readable formats are distributed via OFAC's Sanctions List Service. Every list entry appearing in this site's examples is fictional.
- Official requirement
Consolidated list of persons, groups and entities subject to EU financial sanctions ↗ — European Commission · EU consolidated list of persons, groups and entities
Covers only financial sanctions consisting of asset freezes; the EU Sanctions Map (sanctionsmap.eu) documents the broader restrictive-measure regimes.
- Simplified educational illustration
Payments Signal editorial teaching models — Payments Signal
What this simplifies: Field inventories are summarised across issuers rather than reproduced per schema, and the missing-person-poster analogy overstates how complete typical entries are. The linked clean-pass scenario uses fictional names and a simplified entry structure.
Used wherever diagrams, scenarios, figures, or example values are didactic constructions rather than sourced facts; every such use carries a simplifications disclosure. All people, companies, banks, and list entries in examples are fictional.
Deepest material on this page: L4 — Standards & sources. Where a topic stops short of implementation depth, that is a deliberate coverage decision, not an oversight — see coverage.