US Entity Diligence
Before you sign a supplier, onboard a vendor or wire a deposit: what do the federal records already say about this company? Four official sources, one pass, no account.
What it checks
- SEC EDGAR. Whether the entity is a registered filer, its CIK, state of incorporation and SIC code — the fastest way to tell a real reporting company from a name on a letterhead.
- OFAC SDN.Treasury's sanctions list, screened by name, with the SDN ID and sanctions programme for every match so you can adjudicate it yourself.
- Federal awards. Contracts and grants from USAspending.gov, with the awarding agency and dollar amounts — evidence the entity has actually been paid by the US government, and by whom.
- Federal dockets.Cases naming the entity, from CourtListener's RECAP archive, with case name, court and filing date.
- An honest not-checked column. Any source we could not reach is reported as not checked, never as clean.
Questions
- Which records does this actually check?
- Four, all of them official and all of them free to the public: SEC EDGAR's company database (is the entity a registered filer, under what CIK, state of incorporation and SIC code), the US Treasury's OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list, USAspending.gov's record of federal contracts and grants, and federal court dockets through CourtListener's RECAP archive. We do not add a scraped or purchased data source, because you would not be able to verify it.
- Does an OFAC match mean the company is sanctioned?
- No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a liability. Sanctions screening is name screening: a match means an entity with a similar name is on the SDN list. Confirming whether it is the same entity is a human judgment made against the SDN record itself, which is why the report gives you the SDN ID and sanctions programme for every match rather than a green tick.
- What happens if one of the government sources is down?
- That source is reported as 'not checked', never as clean. This matters more than it sounds: a screening tool that silently reports 'no sanctions match' when Treasury was unreachable is worse than no tool at all, because it manufactures a false record of diligence.
- What does the $99 report add over the free screen?
- The free screen tells you how many records each source holds and shows one sample. The report attaches all of them: every matching EDGAR filer with its CIK, every SDN match with its sanctions programme, the full federal award list with agency and dollar amount, and the dockets with case name, court and filing date. It is the difference between knowing there are 352 federal dockets and being able to read what they are.
- Is this a background check on a person?
- No. This screens business entities against federal business records. It is not a consumer report, it is not FCRA-regulated, and it must not be used for employment, tenancy or credit decisions about an individual.
- Does it cover state incorporation records?
- Not yet, and the report says so rather than implying full coverage. There is no free unified federal API for the fifty state business registries. What is here is the federal layer — which is where sanctions, federal contracting and federal litigation live.
- Can my AI agent call this directly?
- Yes. There is an MCP server at /api/mcp/us-diligence exposing the same free screen as a screen_us_company tool, so an agent doing vendor onboarding or lead qualification can run it without a human in the loop.