Our world was dramatically altered on September 11, 2001. When foreign terrorists violated the security of our homeland, we were no longer able to take for granted the Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness that our Founding Fathers set forth. True to the American Spirit, the United States responded to 9/11 not by cowering in fear, but by enacting bold and sweeping initiatives concerning our National Security. The central and most vital component of America’s new security policy is The USA PATRIOT ACT, passed overwhelmingly by a bipartisan Congress following 9/11.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) “…enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, and those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” Although OFAC compliance is not a new thing, the USA PATRIOT ACT imposed more stringent guidelines for many financial and other businesses, which must screen current and prospective clients against an ever-growing list of known terrorists: “Specially Designated Nationals” or “SDNs”.

USA PATRIOT ACT compliance may be expensive and time-consuming for affected institutions. But noncompliance is certainly not a prudent option and carries a high penalty. Companies found in noncompliance are subject to criminal prosecution and large financial penalties, ranging from tens of thousands to several million dollars.

A More Perfect Union

Intelligent Search Technology, Ltd. (IST) has used its robust, industry-leading search software and matching technology to create ISTwatch©, an OFAC compliance software solution that helps companies comply with the USA PATRIOT ACT. Not only does ISTwatch© screen against the OFAC list, but also the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List, Denied Parties List, the Canadian OSFI list, and others.

In seconds, ISTwatch© performs terrorist searches in real-time, batch or via online processing. Our PATRIOT ACT compliance technology can deliver throughput in excess of 25,000 records per second. This high level of performance and accuracy is achieved by utilizing advanced software technology and state-of-the-art searching algorithms, used over the past 12 years by thousands of Federal, State, and Local government agencies and Fortune 500 companies.

ISTwatch© intelligently overcomes linguistic characteristics of multi-national geographic regions. Foreign names are often transcribed into phonetically constructed English representations. The same name can be spelled in several different ways, such as Mohammed, Muhammad, Muhamed, M’hamed, etc. Special name searching rules were created in ISTwatch© to handle problems such as these and others, from data sources containing Anglo, European, and Middle Eastern names.

In short, IST is The Intelligent Choice for identity verification, terrorist search and OFAC compliance!