What is denied party screening?

We recently had a couple customers ask us questions about denied party screening, also referred to as denied trade screening. There are a couple other terms for it, but at the end of the day denied party screening is a general term for when you screen the customers or the buyers of your product to make sure that they don’t have any sanctions on them from the US or from the UN.

There are over 80 public lists that are published on line for free that you can check to make sure that the people that are buying your products are not listed. The reason you want to do this is because if you are ever audited by a government, you have the burden of proof to demonstrate that you did your due diligence to make sure that your vendors or customers did not appear in any list, and it was obviously there was no intent to do any malice against an enemy of the state. So, what the denied party screening, or DPS, gives you is a method to stay compliant to make sure that your company has done its due diligence.

How can I perform denied party screening?

How to perform DPS is another question that that comes up. There are a few different ways you can go about this. One is to download every list multiple times a month and run your customers through it. If you have an ERP system, there may be software that you can add which will do this for you. Another way is to join a compliance network where you upload a list of buyers or vendors and they will give you a report to make sure there are no red flags. Finally, you can rely on the freight forwarder who export your products to handle this for you.

At Ark, we do a lot of exports and imports, so for our customers we always run the buyer, or the shipper of the goods for imports, through our DPS compliance software to make sure that they’re protected. While not every forwarded does this, we have taken it as a burden on us to make sure our customers are protected. They find it important not only for their shippers but also for themselves to make sure that they are not helping a sanctioned state in any capacity.

If you have any other questions regarding DPS, or regarding the lists or how to find these lists, please feel free to reach out as we’re more than happy to help.

Find the list of denied parties here: https://www.export.gov/csl-search