Best practice to handle ID / National ID search

Support & Questions
1

Three quick clarifications:

  1. IDs are returned without special characters (e.g., HKID A808080(9) → A8080809). → Should we send both raw and cleaned versions, or do you normalize automatically?

  2. Many PEP records have no ID stored (e.g., Li Ka-shing). When we search name + ID, the record disappears. → Best practice: treat ID as optional and always fall back to name match?

  3. What exactly is the difference between “ID” and “National ID” in your data?

2

Hi @innoac, we have two categories of identifiers in the data: those with a well-understood format (eg: swiftBic, ogrnCode, innCode, uscCode, leiCode) and more generic fields for identifiers whose format we do not have specific handling instructions for (eg.: registrationNumber, idNumber, taxNumber ). We do minimal normalization when we compare these, so it’s a bit more of a matter of luck than I’d really like.

For PEP screening in particular, we very very rarely have IDs from the data source - so I think putting them into the request mostly makes sense in a sanctions screening use case.

Finally, there’s the entity ID itself - which is something we generate and manage, not a property of the person. See https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/identifiers/ for more info.

Best,

  • Friedrich