The Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury recently launched a new version of SDN Search, the search tool for searching its Specially Designated Nationals (“SDN”) and blocked persons list.  According to OFAC, the new version of SDN Search provides users with much more leeway when searching for names.  For example, SDN Search no longer returns only exact matches.  SDN Search now makes use of character, string, and phonetic matching algorithms to provide the user with a broader set of results.  This gives SDN Search the ability to account for differences in spelling and transliteration.

SDN Search is available on OFAC’s website.