A few years ago I was sitting down at lunch with a friend who was a former employee of the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”). During that lunch she mentioned that OFAC was planning on releasing an online filing system for license applications. At the time I was excited, but after about a year, I saw no OFAC license application system was released, and I figured that the idea had probably been scrapped. Flash forward to April 18, 2013 and OFAC has now revealed their online application process.

Although surely there will be bugs that need to be worked out, OFAC did a good job on the application process. The online application allows the applicant to apply for any type of license, including those for export of agricultural commodities, food, medicine, and medical devices, those for unblocking for funds, Cuba travel licenses, and any other type of transactional licenses. While all of the Cuba license categories have not been included in the online license application process at this point, most of them have been. The process also allows the applicant to select the program under which authorization is sought and the subcategory of activity for which application is sought. Included in those subcategories are academic institution seminars, commercial transactions, exchange programs, exports, financial transactions, humanitarian projects, imports, insurance transactions, law enforcement, legal services, not specified, other services, personal remittances, property transactions, and telecom/satellite services. It should be noted that this process can also be used for requesting interpretative guidance, so that may explain why some subcategories for generally authorized activity (e.g., personal remittances) are included in the drop down menu.

The license application process, at least for transactional licenses, is not a complete departure from the previous system. OFAC still requires a .pdf attachment to describe the transactions to be engaged in. As such, while the submission process might become easier, there is still a need to draft a submission to OFAC that accurately and completely describes the activity. This also affords the applicant an opportunity to advocate as to why the authorization should be granted and provides a process by which the applicant can submit legal and policy arguments in favor of authorization. One of my main concerns with the online process was that the art of advocating for a license authorization would be lost in an automated rigid form based system. I think OFAC has struck a great balance in their electronic filing system. It provides the efficiency of an online system, while maintaining the ability for applicants to provide arguments as to why authorization should be granted. Nice job OFAC.

The author of this blog is Erich Ferrari, an attorney specializing in OFAC matters. If you have any questions please contact him at 202-280-6370 or ferrari@ferrariassociatespc.com.