ISTwatch© - USA PATRIOT ACT Compliance Software

USA PATRIOT Act was created due to increased security concerns. To help the government fight the funding of terrorism and money laundering activities, all financial institutions and many other types of businesses are required by law to screen the individuals and organizations with which they do business.

Matching names, addresses, cities, countries to the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) list maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department is an important requirement and can often be more complicated than it seems. Foreign names, variety of forms and spellings and other techniques that bad guys use to disguise themselves can cause serious problems. Fortunately, Intelligent Search Technology has developed USA PATRIOT ACT compliance software that addresses those specific issues. ISTwatch© - our OFAC terrorist searching software uses the searching and matching intelligence of NameSearch® to achieve unparalleled accuracy and speed while overcoming variations due to misspellings, transcriptions, transpositions, acronyms, phonetics, sequence differences, nicknames and many other common errors found in data.

Foreign names often have multiple English transcriptions, which may cause a lot of confusion in the data matching process. The same Middle Eastern name can be spelled in 5-10 different ways, based on conventions used. These differences include vowel and diacritic representations, non-standard word splitting and concatenation, use of glottal stops, double letters and consonants not present in Latin-based alphabets. Depending on a transcription method, the name “Mohammed Al-Kadir” can be spelled as “Mohammad Alqadir”, “Muhamad Alkadr”, “M’hamed Al Qadr”, making it impossible for regular comparison routines to find all relevant matches.

Officials at the FBI, CIA and INS cited a list of problems that pose as obstacles for law enforcement. The top issues on the list are
• conflicting methods used by agencies for spelling the same name
• inadequate software searching and matching capabilities at many organizations

ISTwatch© was specifically developed to overcome variations due to foreign name transcriptions. Loaded with an expert rule-base system and a set of specialized services, it handles a majority of such difficult cases, such as the ones below.

The US and other governments are investigating enterprises that do business with identified suspect individuals and organizations and there are huge fines for non-compliance. Ensure adequate USA PATRIOT ACT compliance by utilizing the power and flexibility of ISTwatch©.