Free screening name checker

Paste the company names you are about to screen. This flags the ones a name-matching screen is likely to handle badly — before you run them and read the results as clean. It runs entirely in your browser: nothing you paste is sent anywhere, by us or anyone else.

Nothing leaves this page. There is no request to make: the check is the name normalizer from our Import Risk Screening API, compiled into this page and checked against its source on every build. Our other screening products carry their own copies, so treat the flags as advisory about the shape of a name rather than a statement about any one matcher.

What it checks, and why each one costs you a match

Written as one word, with no spaces
The expensive one. A name-similarity screen compares sets of words; a compacted string is one word that appears in neither set, so what is left is an edit-distance comparison a short string cannot win. We measured it on 97 real listed entities: a company's short name found its record 98% of the time spelled with spaces and 4% without, and half the misses scored below the floor where any near miss would be reported. The measurement and the data.
Nothing comparable after normalisation
A name in another script, or one that is only punctuation and a legal form, reduces to an empty string — and an empty string scores zero against every record on every list. A screen that reports that as no_match is reporting a comparison that never happened. What a screening API does not show you.
Only very short words
Two-letter tokens match far too much. Matchers that let them carry a score produce noise; matchers that discount them, as ours does, leave a name of only short tokens with nothing substantive to compare.
Characters that are dropped before comparison
Letters outside the Latin alphabet and digits are not compared. That is not necessarily wrong — it is how most matchers work — but it is worth knowing which of your names lose content on the way in.
A trailing legal form
Informational, not a problem: Ltd, GmbH, S.A. and their cousins are compared both with and without, so a list that records the form and a list that does not still meet.

What this tool does not do

It does not screen anything. It never contacts a list, so it cannot and does not tell you whether a name appears on one. It reports only how well a name-matching screen will be able to compare that name — the step before the screen, which is invisible in every screening result we have seen.

To actually screen: Import Risk Screening queries the UFLPA Entity List and the Consolidated Screening List, and FDA Import Alert Screening queries FDA's Import Alert firm lists. Both report what they could not establish rather than returning a bare clean.