Patriot Dealer Microsite
Protect Your Dealership - and your country
The USA Patriot Act, which was signed into law in October 2001, imposed additional anti-terrorism and money laundering compliance responsibilities on automobile dealerships and sales finance companies. However, the USA Patriot Act also focused attention on a compliance responsibility that has been in place for several years.
Dealers and sales finance companies must perform due diligence when entering into customer contracts. This separate due diligence requirement is clear and its obligation immediate:
Auto dealers are required by law to review the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list, which includes the names of individuals, organizations and countries against whom the U.S has imposed sanctions. Dealerships must review this list prior to entering into any sales or finance contract with an individual, business entity, charitable organization - anyone.
There are penalties for those that do not establish procedures to review the OFAC list and there are fines for dealerships that enter into a contract with anyone on the list. Also, if you enter into a finance contract with a person on the list and then attempt to assign the contract, your proposed assignee will likely return the contract to you. You could end up with one less car and a worthless contract.
Why Patriotdealer.com?
Unfortunately, OFAC does not make it easy for you to check the list. It's an extensive list (currently containing more than 4,000 names of individuals, business entities and others) and is updated frequently. Although the list is published on the Treasury Department's website, it is not in an electronically searchable format. You could electronically integrate the search function into your dealership's F&I operation, but then you would have to do a fair amount of data and application integration with OFAC's website and maintain constant updates. Alternatively, you could print out the list (it's over 130 pages long!) and manually review it. But, this would be impractical and would delay the delivery process.
At PatriotDealer.com, we've done the heavy lifting for you. We've converted the list into an easily searchable web application that takes only seconds to use. We're making it available for a low annual subscription fee of $699. Our application is easy to use, and unlike other OFAC information databases, was designed specifically for and by dealership professionals.
To further protect your dealership, we provide you with a print out of the search results that you keep for your records.