Compliance Tools

Trade compliance tools cover a spectrum from OFAC's free SDN search on treasury.gov to enterprise GTM platforms costing hundreds of thousands annually. The right tool depends on transaction volume, product complexity, and the specific compliance obligation being addressed. A company doing 20 export shipments a month to low-risk destinations needs different tooling than one doing 2,000 shipments across controlled product categories to sensitive markets. The free government tools — OFAC's SDN search, BIS's Consolidated Screening List on trade.gov, the HTSUS on usitc.gov — are accurate but manual. Commercial tools add automation, audit trails, and list aggregation. We cover what each category of tool actually does, where the gaps are, and what "consolidated screening" means in practice versus in a sales deck.