Why a sanctions screen can come back unavailable
Unavailable is not clean. It means no list answered, and the agent will not close a case on it.
A sanctions screen asks every list your organisation has connected. Sometimes none of them answers. The screen then reads unavailable, which is not the same as clean.
A sanctions screen asks every list you have connected. Whether the screen has an answer at all is settled before any verdict is worked out, so a screen can never report clean on the strength of calls that nobody answered.
| The screen says | When |
|---|---|
| Sanctioned | A list that answered returned a hit carrying the sanctions topic.Outranks everything else on the screen. |
| Flagged | A list that answered returned a hit, and none of them is a sanctions listing.A PEP, a debarment or a linked associate. A reason to look closer. |
| Clean | At least one list answered, and none of them had anything.Reports only the coverage you actually got. |
| Unavailable | No list answered at all. Every provider failed, or none was configured.There is no verdict. This is the one people misread. |
Unavailable is not clean
Clean means the lists answered and had nothing. Unavailable means nobody answered, so there is nothing to know yet. The agent will not close a case as a false positive on an unavailable screen, because treating missing information as a pass is wrong in the one direction that matters.
Simplified for explanation.
Only one of the four means the subject was checked and nothing matched.
Why no list answered
Usually one of three things. The vendor was down when the agent called. Your credentials no longer work. Or you have no list connected that covers the chain the address is on.
What it means for the case
The run continues. A vendor outage does not fail an investigation. The agent records that it could not screen the subject, writes no finding from the screen, and carries on with everything else.
What changes is the recommendation. The agent will not recommend closing the case as a false positive on an unavailable screen. It recommends holding or escalating, and it names the subject that went unchecked.
What to do about it
- 1
Check the vendor and your credentials
An outage resolves on its own. Expired credentials do not.
- 2
Ask the agent to run the investigation again
Ask in the case's side panel. A screen that now answers replaces the unavailable one.
- 3
If it still cannot screen, decide on that basis
You can close a case the agent would hold. The record shows you closed it on an unavailable screen, so say why in the rationale.
Related
Last checked against the product on .