Search the official list for the company's legal name and each known alias, then compare the identifiers that come back — address, country, registration number, list entry ID. A name match on its own is not an answer; the same name can belong to two unrelated companies.
The US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) maintains the Entity List inside the Export Administration Regulations. Being on it does not stop you trading with the company in general. It means that exporting, re-exporting or transferring listed items to that party requires a licence, and those licence applications are usually reviewed with a presumption of denial.
That distinction matters in practice. A European distributor buying a software subscription is in a different position from a machine-tool supplier shipping controlled equipment. The question is never "is this company on the list" in the abstract — it is "am I sending them something the list covers".
| What happens | Why |
|---|---|
| A hit on part of a word | Short tokens such as three-letter abbreviations turn up inside longer unrelated words. Matching on substrings rather than whole words produces hits that are not the same company. |
| Hits on very common words | Tokens like Trading, Group, Express and Logistics are shared by thousands of unrelated companies. |
| Nothing back, for a real match | Transliteration. Names written in Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic or Greek lose their character set when converted to Latin letters, and the conversion differs by country and by vendor. |
| Legal-suffix confusion | A/S, Ltd, GmbH, LLC, Co. are not part of the identity. Stripping or keeping them changes the string but not the company. |
A match tells you that a name on a list resembles the name you searched. It does not tell you the company in front of you is that party. Clear it the same way you would clear any other screening hit: check country, registration number, address and business activity; if any of those disagree, you are looking at two different companies and you record why.
A no-match tells you that the name, as you spelled it, is not on the lists on the day you looked. It says nothing about ownership, subsidiaries, or whether the company is registered at all.
No. OFAC's SDN list is a sanctions instrument — dealing with a listed party is itself restricted. The Entity List is an export-control instrument aimed at specific items. Many companies appear on one and not the other. If you need both, you need two checks, not one.
Yes. Our free instant check runs on this site and takes a few seconds. It matches a company name against the official OFAC, UK, EU, UN and US BIS sanctions and export-control lists we hold and shows the entries that come back.
Treat it as a prompt to look closer, not a conclusion. A screening signal is read by a person: check the identifiers, decide, and keep the note.