Sanctions List Delta Monitor — OFAC, UN, UK OFSI, EU Changes Feed

The change feed for the world's major sanctions lists. Every scheduled run downloads the official lists, diffs them against the previous run and emits one record per addition, removal or amendment — including exactly which fields changed. Screening tools tell you whether a name is sanctioned now; this actor tells you what changed since you last checked, which is what re-screening triggers, case reviews and audit trails actually need.

Lists covered

List	Source	Entities (Aug 2026)
ofac	US Treasury OFAC — SDN list plus the consolidated non-SDN list (official sanctionslistservice.ofac.treas.gov exports)	~19,800
un	UN Security Council consolidated list (scsanctions.un.org XML)	~1,000
uk	UK OFSI consolidated list of financial sanctions targets (official ConList.csv)	~5,100
eu	EU consolidated financial sanctions list (FSF) — needs a free EU Login token, see below	~4,900

First run seeds — it emits nothing

By design the first run of each list stores a baseline and emits zero records (so you are never billed for 20,000+ "changes" that are just the existing list). From the second run on, only genuine deltas are emitted. Want the full list as records once? Set emitInitialSnapshot: true and the first run emits every entity as added (the maxItems cap applies).

Recommended schedule: daily (OFAC publishes most business days; UN/UK/EU update several times a month).

Example output record

{
  "list": "ofac",
  "entityId": "sdn-52161",
  "changeType": "amended",
  "name": "BANK MARKAZI JOMHOURI ISLAMI IRAN",
  "aliases": ["CENTRAL BANK OF IRAN", "BANK MARKAZI IRAN"],
  "entityType": "entity",
  "programs": ["IRAN", "SDGT", "IRGC", "IFSR"],
  "changedFields": ["aliases", "remarks"],
  "listedDate": null,
  "sourceUrl": "https://sanctionslistservice.ofac.treas.gov/api/PublicationPreview/exports/SDN.CSV",
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-31T04:52:11Z"
}

changeType is added, removed or amended. For amendments, changedFields names the normalised fields that moved (e.g. aliases, programs, dob, passportNumbers, remarks) — alias reordering, whitespace and duplicate noise never trigger a change. entityId is the list's own stable identifier (OFAC uid, UN DATAID, OFSI Group ID, EU logical id), prefixed sdn-/cons- for the two OFAC files.

Input options

Field	Default	What it does
lists	["ofac", "un", "uk"]	Which lists to monitor. Add "eu" once your EU token URL is configured.
euTokenUrl	—	Your personal EU full-list download URL (secret). Get one in ~5 minutes: register a free EU Login at webgate.ec.europa.eu/fsd/fsf, then copy the token download URL for the XML full list. Without it the EU list is skipped with a log note.
programs	all	Only emit changes for entities under these programmes (e.g. RUSSIA-EO14024, SDGT, Global Human Rights). Case-insensitive.
entityTypes	all	Filter to individual, entity, vessel and/or aircraft.
maxItems	1000	Cap on change records per run. Split fairly across the lists that have changes, and nothing is lost: a change the cap holds back stays pending and is emitted by the next run.
emitInitialSnapshot	false	Emit the whole list as added records on each list's first run.

Reliability

• Partial-failure safe: if one list's endpoint is down (5xx), that list is skipped with a warning and its stored baseline is untouched — the other lists still diff normally. A list that suddenly returns zero entities is treated as a broken download, never as 20,000 removals.
• No list starves, no change is lost: maxItems is split fairly across the lists that actually have changes (a quiet list holds no share), and any change held back by the cap stays pending — its stored baseline entry is left as-is, so the very next run re-detects and emits it. A busy sanctions day can never silently swallow the UK, UN or EU changes behind OFAC's.
• Amendment-grade diffing: entities are compared as normalised field sets, so a DOB correction, new passport number or added alias surfaces as a named changedFields entry, while cosmetic re-ordering does not.
• Only official government sources are read. No scraping of third-party aggregators.

Use cases

• KYC / AML re-screening triggers — "alert my compliance queue when anyone is added to OFAC SDN or the UK list under RUSSIA programmes" and re-screen your customer base only when something actually changed.
• Audit trail of list changes — keep a dated dataset of every addition, removal and amendment across OFAC, UN, UK and EU for regulator-ready evidence of your monitoring cadence.
• Screening-vendor data pipelines — feed deltas instead of re-ingesting full lists: cheaper, faster, and you know exactly which records to touch.
• Crypto compliance — OFAC amendments include digital-currency address updates in the remarks field of the affected entity.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small per-run fee plus a fee per change detected. Calm weeks cost you almost nothing; busy sanctions days deliver exactly the records you need to act on.

Maintenance

Source formats are checked against the official publications; schema drift is logged clearly and never crashes a run. If a list moves its download URL, the actor is updated — the state format keeps your baselines.

Changelog

• 0.1 — initial release: OFAC (SDN + consolidated non-SDN), UN, UK OFSI live; EU consolidated list supported via personal EU Login token URL.
• 0.1 maintenance (1 Sep 2026) — internals moved onto the shared monitor library. Your stored baselines are bit-for-bit unchanged (no reseed, no re-emitted changes), and a download error that can never recover — a moved or forbidden URL — now fails fast instead of spending the run on retries.
• 0.1 maintenance (1 Sep 2026) — maxItems is now shared FAIRLY across the enabled lists and no longer destroys anything: previously a busy OFAC day could consume the whole cap in list order and the UN/UK/EU changes behind it were lost for good. Changes the cap holds back now stay pending and are emitted by the next run. (One exception, logged loudly: emitInitialSnapshot is a one-off dump, so a capped first run still seeds its baseline in full.)