The sanctions coverage gap.
89% of sanctioned names appear on only one of the four major lists. Screening a single list is not screening.
The question
Most compliance tools screen one sanctions list, usually OFAC, and call it done. We consolidated the four major regimes (US Treasury OFAC, EU, UK and UN) and asked a simple question: how much does each list actually cover?
What we found
# name-level overlap across the four consolidated lists
# what screening a single list covers
Why this happens
The four regimes designate different people and entities, at different times, for different reasons. Only 529 names, less than one percent, appear on all four lists. A counterparty clean on OFAC can be designated in the EU or UK, and your bank, your payment processor and your regulator may care about all of them.
The operational conclusion is blunt: single-list screening leaves most of the combined designation universe unchecked.
Method and caveats
We compare normalized name strings (case, punctuation and diacritics removed) across the lists as published on the snapshot date, counting aliases the way the lists publish them. This measures name-form overlap, not entity identity: the same entity can be spelled differently across regimes, so true entity-level overlap is somewhat higher. That caveat does not rescue single-list screening; name-based matching against one list still misses the name forms the other three publish.
Screen all four in one query
Veriastra screens the consolidated set in a single lookup, with alias matching, per-source attribution and a signed result receipt. Try it free or use the API.