US Working to Make Sure SDN List, Entity List Are 'Harmonized,' BIS Official Says

The Bureau of Industry and Security is working more closely with the Office of Foreign Assets Control on enforcement issues, which could allow the two agencies to better align the BIS Entity List and OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals List, a BIS official said this week.

Kevin Kurland, the deputy assistant secretary for export enforcement at BIS, said the agency has recently been doing “a lot more proactive sharing of targets with OFAC.” BIS now reviews parties that OFAC is preparing to add to its Specially Designated Nationals List, Kurland said, which allows BIS to run those people and entities through its database and alert OFAC if BIS has an ongoing investigation involving those parties.

If there is overlap, BIS can tell OFAC that it already has “investigative equity here,” Kurland said, and the agencies can decide the best way forward, which may include working together on the investigation.

The increased cooperation will help BIS “know where they're headed, and they’ll know where we're headed,” Kurland said during a Dec. 12 BIS technical advisory committee meeting. “Obviously, we want to make sure that there's a potential synergy in those” enforcement actions.

He said the partnership is “just good government.” It’s allowing “us to be synced with them and then to make sure that to the extent [we can], that the SDN and the Entity List themselves are harmonized,” Kurland said. “We want to continue to work on that.”

Lawmakers have urged the Biden administration to harmonize its export controls and sanctions list (see 2302280064). The House Financial Services Committee in September advanced a bill that could require the administration to make annual determinations on whether sanctions should be applied to companies listed on various government denied party lists, including the Entity List and Military End-User List (see 2309200052).

BIS and Commerce Department officials have called for more funding from Congress to help it carry out that harmonization work and other export control implementation issues (see 2312070074 and 2312040041). Kurland noted that BIS is working with “limited resources" to uncover and prevent export control violations, but said the Disruptive Technology Strike Force -- which pools together officials from BIS, DOJ, the FBI and HSI to investigate and prosecute breaches of technology export controls -- is helping it prioritize the most pressing cases.

“Certainly, from a BIS perspective, getting prosecutors, agents and the analysts to really focus on threats that are of highest priority for us” is “critical,” Kurland said. That includes illegal exports of artificial intelligence-related technology, supercomputing technology, quantum technology and hypersonic missiles, he said. “It's the over-the-horizon threats,” Kurland said. “When our cases run up against those, those are the things we prioritize.”

BIS also is prioritizing enforcement involving government and defense contractors in China, Russia and Iran, he said, along with end-users involved with weapons of mass destruction and human rights abuses. “So I think just aligning those priorities internally with what the strike force is focused on is really critical for us to use our limited resources."

Kurland also said BIS plans to update it’s “Don’t Let This Happen To You” guidance sometime next year. The guidance, last updated in October 2022 (see 2210140022), includes summaries and case examples of past export control investigations.

“It's a popular download from the website,” Kurland said. “A lot of the cases that we've had over the past year have some really useful fact patterns to inform the regulated community.”