OFAC Screening Coverage

The percentage of transactions screened for sanctions, where best practice is 100 percent coverage.

TL;DR

TL;DR: Screening coverage measures how many transactions are checked, and best practice is 100 percent: every transaction, every counterparty, no exceptions.

Why partial coverage fails

Any transaction that is not screened is a potential violation. A 95 percent coverage rate means 5 percent of flows go out without a sanctions check, and because enforcement is strict liability, a single unscreened payment to a blocked party is enough for a penalty. Partial coverage also creates a record that the program knowingly left some flows unchecked. Anything below 100 percent is a known, deliberate gap, which is hard to explain after a violation.

How to reach full coverage

Full coverage requires screening to be built into the payment path itself, not applied as a separate manual step. If the check is a prerequisite to the transfer, coverage is automatic for every transaction. The alternative, screening samples or high value payments only, is how gaps appear. The metric is simple to state and simple to audit: count screened transactions and divide by total transactions.

Coverage for agent payments

For AI agents, coverage has to be programmatic because there is no human reviewer. sanctionsai.dev returns ALLOW or BLOCK in under 100 ms, fast enough to gate every payment without slowing the flow. The 4-Gate protocol's SCREEN step runs on every transaction, making 100 percent coverage the default rather than the aspiration. High coverage also means the screen itself must be fast enough to sit in every path. The free tier supports 5 checks per day for small scale testing.