Watchlists

Watchlists help you to comply with the voluntary guidelines set forth by the Treasury Departments’ Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

You can select via preferences the compliance lists to be used for the vetting of their organizations and contacts. Based on the compliance lists selected, WatchDOG returns any hits and presents them for processing. You, in turn, can review these hits and save information about each, including False Positives. Any organization that you research and shows to be a False Positive can then be added to a Whitelist. Records included in the Whitelist are excluded from future verifications until the time when, and if, any of the information in the white-listed record changes.

Activity records are created when selected Organizations or Contacts are verified against Watchlists. When hits are found, the Due Date is set to 5 days from the current date. You can search for, open, and update these Activities manually as you can for any other History Activity.

Note: Managing the Watchlist preferences and executing Watchlist Actions are available only to users with the Client Admin, Grants Manager, and Grant Associate Roles. If a user’s role does not include this permission, Watchlist menu options are hidden from the user.

When you decide to verify Organizations and Contacts against the Watchlists, there are several options that come into play, like which specific Watchlists to search, whether or not to search certain related records, and what values need to be matched to be considered a hit.

To access these settings in the Manage watchlists form, select Control panel, Settings. On the Organization tile, select the menu , Manage watchlists.

Lists

  • Threshold: To indicate a threshold value, enter a number (only .75-1.00 permitted). The default threshold is set to .85.

  • Lists: To select a list for inclusion, select the check box next to the list name. Default Search Lists are: OFAC, BIS, OSFI, UNSL, FBI, Interpol, TEL

Organization search options

  • Match organizations on: Organizations automatically matched by Name, AKA, and Legal Name, so this option is selected and disabled. The client can choose to match on City, State, and Country. Note that in this and all cases, if the source field is blank, this is considered a positive match. For instance, if the Organization has City and State but no Country, and City and State match, the match is considered positive. But if the Organization does have a Country and it is different from the value on the watchlist, the match is negative.

  • Include parents and subsidiaries: If this flag is checked (which it is by default) not only does the selected Organization be searched, but any other Organization related to it as either a Parent or Subsidiary.

  • Included related contacts: The client can choose to search related Contacts when they search the Organization. The client can choose by Role:

    • Primary contacts: The Contact related through the Organization's Primary Contact.

    • Employees: Contacts related to the Organization through an Affiliation record with a Contact.

    • Request primary contact: An indirect relationship using the Request's Primary Contact.

    • All affiliated contacts: Since this option incorporates the three above, if this is checked, the above three prompts should be checked and disabled. Subsequently, unchecking this option enables the other prompts and leaves them checked.

    • Include "closed" affiliations: If false, then only Affiliations with an empty or null To date is included when evaluating the above relationships. If true, then all Affiliations are considered. Defaults: Primary Contacts and Employees default to true; the rest of the options to false.

  • Match related contacts on: If the client is including any Contacts, they automatically are matched on First Name and Last Name. Additional options let the matching process to include Social Security Number and/or Birth Date. With Birth Date, the value is considered a match if the value in the watch list is up to ‘x’ years earlier or a year later. (For example, if the value in the database is 6/1/1975 and the default value is left at 1, then any date between 6/1/1974 and 6/1/1976 would be considered a match.)

Contact Search Options

  • Match contacts on - Same as described above for Match related contacts on.

  • Include related organizations: The client has the option of choosing the Contact’s Primary Organization or All affiliated Contacts, with the same option to include Closed Affiliations as described above. Both options are selected by default; the option to include Closed Affiliations defaults to false.

  • Match related organizations on - Same as described above for Match organizations on.

Check watchlists checks the selected Organizations or Contacts against the watchlists selected in Preferences, and creates special Activity records for each one with the hit results.

You can then review each hit and determine whether it is a true hit (meaning that person or institution is indeed on that watchlist) or a false positive (meaning that although the criteria matched the record in the database with one on the watchlist, they are not in fact the same).

You can check watchlists from Organization or Contact record search results at the bottom of the screen, or directly from the Organization or Contact record. When you select Check watchlists, you'll be asked to confirm your intentions. Select Yes to continue and view the progress bar. The system evaluates each record (Organization or Contact) against each Watchlist selected in Preferences and an Activity is created for each Organization and Contact checked. If there are no hits, the Activity is created Done status. If there are new hits, the Activity is created with an Open status, unless the Organization or Contact was previously marked as a false positive. In that case, the Activity is marked as Done, with the text “Hits found. Marked false positive. See Long Notes.” in the Notes field.

After the Check watchlists process, the Check Watchlists – Summary form displays.

Note: At this point, the Activities have already been created and saved, and that the detail for Hits is displayed by default, and the detail for Non-hits is collapsed by default.

The information in the tables is organized first by the record type being verified. Each Organization or Contact included in the set is listed alphabetically. Any related records are presented as a subset beneath each main record.

Note: In some cases, the related record may include a hit while the main record does not. In this case, the main record is included for context even if it doesn’t belong in that category.

From here, you can Verify hits.

Verify hits lets you to see the details of the Check watchlists results in detail. The Check watchlists process retrieves much more detail than is easily presented in the grid on the summary page.

Select Verify hits to view details for the selected records in the grid. From here, you can mark the hit as a false positive and/or add any notes to be appended to the Activity records.

Review watchlists retrieves the Activities from the most recent check. In other words, the Watchlist Activity record with the most recent Create Date (any earlier Activities are ignored).

You can review watchlists from Organization or Contact record search results at the bottom of the screen, or directly from the Organization or Contact record.

The summary is very similar to the Check Watchlists – Summary, with the following exceptions.

  • Form title - Review watchlists – Summary

  • Summary text: {#} {Organization(s) or Contact(s)} selected.

    Note: This is the number of selected Organizations or Contacts in the Search Results or Related Records grids.

  • Open summary: Hits are open or checks were not performed for # Organization and # Contact records. This section reflects not only the selected records, but any related records as determined by the Watchlists Preferences. If any record in the batch is not associated with any Watchlist Activity record, it is included in this category.

    Note: We consider it open because we don’t know whether there are hits or not since it hasn’t been checked. You can't take any action on that from here.

  • Not Open Summary: No hits are open for # Organization and # Contact records. This category includes all records where the most recent Watchlist Activity.

  • Grid columns: The grid in this view includes two additional columns: Last checked and Closed by. Last checked is the Create Date of the Activity record. Closed by is the Done User ID of the Activity record. Note that a record that has never been checked has no value in this column.