Who can forget that memorable moment when John Swigert first said “Houston … we’ve had a problem”. This normally gets attributed to James Lovell, who repeated it and the movie that slightly modified it. The fact was that Apollo 13, the seventh manned mission in the Apollo space program, had to abort their moon landing after an oxygen tank exploded, severely damaging the spacecraft’s electrical system. We all watched as they barely made it back to earth.
A similar call, although of an entirely different magnitude, recently went out by a law firm to the US Treasury Department regarding a potential SDN problem. At a RainMaker client’s firm, a billing attorney ran a SDN search in Conflicts and although it wasn’t a direct “hit” was concerned that $1,000,000 fine for unintentionally dealing with a terrorist organization was enough to exercise caution. The attorney called the OFAC Hotline and asked for guidance, it appeared as though the client’s name was OK, but then again there was no guarantee, and a million dollars is a lot of money. OFAC gave the attorney the terrorist’s date of birth and suggested they get the client’s DOB, country of citizenship, and a copy of his passport to verify both. The client was not a terrorist and everything was OK.
So, what’s the message …. you just can’t be too sure and this attorney was smart enough to take the extra steps to insure the firm wasn’t going to represent, unintentionally, a terrorist.
To learn more details on OFAC and the SDN list check out some of my previous blog postings on the topic.
http://www.jimhammondblog.com/2010/conflict-searching-technology-for-the-sdn-list/
How many firms have been actually fined for SDN violations? I did a Google search (334,000 results) and it turns up a lot of warnings but I couldn’t find any example of actual violations or fines for law firms.
Do you know of any firm who has actually been fined, if so let me know.
