OFAC Fixes Some Problems With its SDN and Blocked Persons Data
The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control launched a new, internal Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) and Blocked Persons List production system, it said. It's designed to emulate existing SDN data formats, so the transition should be relatively transparent to the public, OFAC said, but some long-standing minor problems with the data formats were corrected. It said users of the emulated SDN data will see some changes to records that are administrative only.
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The changes include:
- All SDN data in the human-readable files now end in a period, which will be a true end of line marker.
- OFAC created some ordering rules for the data.
- Extra or erroneous spaces that appeared in SDN records have been removed.
- All dates in the SDN data files will be published in a single format DD MM YYYY.
- In the past OFAC used the abbreviation "c/o" in the address field to describe a relationship between two or more SDNs. In the new data files, relationships between SDNs will be more clearly defined using the phrase, "Linked To."
- Some e-mail addresses in the OFAC data were associated with a specific country. That association has been removed.
- An inconsistency in the program codes presented in the human-readable SDN files as compared to the machine-readable files regarding Zimbabwe was fixed. The code is now ZIMBABWE in both sets of files.
- Dates of birth may now feature date ranges in place of "circa."
- Records in ADD.* files are now always ordered by ent_num and then by add_num. Records in ALT.* files are now always ordered by ent_num and then by alt_num.
- The SDN.XML file is now ordered by UID.
OFAC said the SDN data files that are produced by OFAC's old SDN production system will be available for a few days in their current location. The new files will be available for download and testing. OFAC encouraged users to download and review of the emulated SDN files (here). Help is available at O_F_A_C@do.treas.gov.