OFAC Guidance: Production Submission Standards
July 5, 2024
The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administers and enforces U.S. economic and trade sanctions, including by investigating potential civil violations of its regulations. During an investigation, persons may seek to produce to OFAC certain information, including documentary and other materials, voluntarily or in response to a request or administrative subpoena. To facilitate OFAC’s review of such material and to expedite OFAC’s consideration and disposition of matters before it, persons submitting information to OFAC are encouraged to follow the best practices outlined in these Production Submission Standards (the “Guidance”).
This Guidance applies primarily to persons providing responses to administrative subpoenas, requests for information (RFIs), disclosures,1 and especially for submissions that may entail voluminous documentation (e.g., more than 100 pages). Additionally, certain technical standards may also pertain to other forms of electronic submissions to...
1) Compare Office of Compliance and Enforcement's Data Delivery Standards Guidance, which this document appears to supersede. Relative to the “Data Delivery Standards Guidance,” this guidance represents a major increase in resource dedication expectations placed on persons submitting documentation to OFAC. The initial version “applie[d] to persons responding to administrative subpoenas from OFAC issued pursuant to 31 C.F.R. § 501.602, though it also may be helpful to persons responding to non-compulsory requests for information or making voluntary self-disclosures in considering how to organize their submissions”. Here, OFAC says that the standards “primarily to persons providing responses to administrative subpoenas, requests for information (RFIs), [voluntary] disclosures, and especially for submissions that may entail voluminous documentation (e.g., more than 100 pages)…”
2) A particularly important (and novel) aspect of the guidance is OFAC’s statement concerning privilege logs, i.e. “you may...