Free US Consolidated Screening List Sanctions Check

The Consolidated Screening List, or CSL, is exactly what it sounds like — a single dataset that bundles together the export and sanctions lists maintained by the US Departments of Commerce, State, and Treasury. It exists because exporters were tired of pulling nine separate lists every time they screened a customer.

The CSL is published by the International Trade Administration. Under the hood it includes: the Entity List, Denied Persons List, Unverified List, and Military End User List from BIS (Commerce); the Nonproliferation Sanctions list and the AECA Debarred List from State; and the SDN, Foreign Sanctions Evaders, Sectoral Sanctions Identifications, Palestinian Legislative Council, Non-SDN Menu-Based Sanctions, and Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies lists from Treasury.

If you export anything from the United States — physical goods, software, technology, services — the CSL is your minimum screening baseline. The Bureau of Industry and Security expects exporters to perform "know your customer" checks, and the CSL is the practical starting point for that.

The CSL also matters for re-exports. US-origin items follow the jurisdiction of the United States even after they leave the country, which means foreign companies handling US-origin technology or software can find themselves on the wrong side of an export control violation. The de minimis rule and the foreign direct product rule both extend US export controls in ways that catch a lot of non-US businesses by surprise.

The two get confused often. The SDN list (administered by Treasury) blocks transactions and freezes property. The Entity List (administered by Commerce) restricts the export, re-export, or transfer of items subject to the Export Administration Regulations to listed parties. An SDN listing is a financial blockade; an Entity List listing is a license requirement.

A name can appear on both — Huawei, for instance, sits on the Entity List but is not on the SDN list. Screening only one is a common gap that compliance teams discover the hard way during an audit.

The CSL is regenerated whenever any of its component lists change, which in practice means several times a week. Each underlying agency publishes its own updates on its own cadence — BIS Federal Register notices for the Entity List, OFAC Recent Actions for SDN, and so on. SanctScan pulls the consolidated dataset and refreshes daily.

Your response depends on which underlying list the match comes from. A hit on the SDN sub-list triggers OFAC's blocking and reporting obligations. A hit on the Entity List means you cannot ship without a license — and BIS denies most license applications for Entity List parties. A hit on the Denied Persons List means no exports of any EAR-controlled items, period.

Always check the source list field on the match record before deciding what to do. Treating every CSL hit as if it were SDN can lead you to block transactions you legally could process; treating every CSL hit as if it were a soft restriction can land you in serious trouble.