Compliance

Sanctions screening in practice: matches and false positives

Inteleo Team· 2026-06-20 ·5 min read

Matching a name to a watchlist is the start, not the end of the analysis. How to read a screening result and reduce false positives.


Sanctions screening compares an entity's data against sanctions and watchlists. The problem is that a similar name is only a hypothesis - and often a false one.

Why false positives appear

  • common names and transliterations,
  • incomplete identifying data,
  • different spelling variants of the entity name.

How to read the result

Every match should have an assigned confidence level and require manual verification at lower values. The decision belongs to a human, and its justification belongs in the audit log.

Human-in-the-loop

A screening result is a lead for verification, not an automated ruling about a person or company.

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