Restricted Party Screening and Visual Compliance

Please see The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research  Restricted Party Screening and Visual Compliance for further information related to the items below. The OVCR website notes the following:

“The U.S. Government publishes, and periodically updates, several lists that identify individuals, companies, institutions, and other entities designated as restricted parties. Some institutions are education institutions, universities, and research institutes. These restricted parties may be prohibited or restricted from engaging in certain transactions or activities with UIC such as receiving an export of U.S. technology, providing services to or receiving services from UIC, or receiving U.S. government funds. The restricted party lists are administered and enforced by several government agencies including the Department of Commerce, the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury and others.

As part of UIC’s export control compliance program, UIC performs restricted party screenings to ensure UIC is not engaging in transactions with individuals, companies, institutions and other organizations, whose U.S. export privileges have been blocked, restricted, or revoked unless the transactions are authorized by the listing government agency.

UIC uses Descartes’ Visual Compliance Research Edition (“Visual Compliance”), a web-based screening tool, to conduct restricted party screenings. Visual Compliance not only provides consolidated screening against all the federally maintained restricted party lists, its Dynamic Screening function automatically and continuously rescreens all previously screened entities for changes in status and notifies the person who originally conducted the screening and the Export Controls Compliance Officer in the event of a change. Visual Compliance also maintains audit documentation that may be retrieved if needed.

We will be transitioning all existing UIC Visual Compliance users from the current Visual Compliance interface to new Visual Compliance Enterprise Research Edition interface. The new interface has enhanced search functions, training materials and best practice blogs. New UIC Visual Compliance users will be automatically registered on new Enterprise Research Edition interface.”

The College recommends that each LAS unit centralize the process by identifying a few individuals (e.g., EO or administrative support staff) to conduct the screenings on behalf of the faculty in the unit and to maintain records. Units may choose to ask faculty to conduct their own screenings and maintain their own records.

We’ve prepared a training video following the step-by-step directions to conduct three complete Visual Compliance screenings (individual and institution). The video demonstrates three types of results you’re likely to encounter: “no matching records found,”and two different types of “matching records found.”

Units may request live trainings, or may encourage faculty to view the training video linked below. If the latter, units are welcome to request a live question and answer session as a follow-up to the video. Please contact Patricia Pfister (pfister@uic.edu).

Before you view the video (or attend a live training offered by LAS), we recommend you prepare by following the simple steps outlined in the document linked below.

  • initiating a formal or informal collaborations
  • discussing plans to engage in sponsored projects
  • exchanging personnel, materials, data, confidential information, or money with foreign persons, academic institutions, governments, companies, or other foreign entities
  • considering research collaborations or appointments
  • inviting a foreign visitor to UIC
  • visiting a foreign university or other foreign entity
  • foreign sponsors and vendors
  • foreign research collaborators
  • foreign subcontractors and subawardees
  • foreign sponsors of international travel and international conferences
  • University-sponsored applicants on H1-B and J-1 Research Scholar, Professor, and short-term scholar visas
  • all personnel associated with export controlled research
  • foreign entities with whom the University has Confidentiality or Non-Disclosure Agreements
  • foreign visitors and visiting scientists
  • recipients of foreign Materials Transfer Agreements

Hints and Help: Heading link

We encourage you to keep the following in mind when reviewing the instructions and FAQs. If you have any questions, please contact Patricia Pfister (pfister@uic.edu).

  • We ask that EOs share information about restricted party screening in the units to ensure the necessary screenings are conducted before any foreign collaborations begin; if collaborations are currently ongoing, screening should be done at this time.
  • Units will decide whether you want to identify 1-2 people to conduct the screenings, have faculty trained so they can conduct their own screenings, or ask the college to run the screenings on your behalf. People who will conduct screenings must register and be trained. A template for a simple survey is available and is linked from the FAQs for units who wish to generate a survey to obtain the required information to conduct screenings.
  • Whoever conducts the screenings, units will come up with a process of saving the results in case of a dynamic screening alert or an audit. Sending results to a single point of contact is most efficient for saving and retrieving the records, but you may set up another process if you prefer.
  • You do not need to use the Visual Compliance tool, but it is significantly easier than conducting manual screenings of multiple relevant public databases and logging the results of each search. Email is the easiest way to save the results of screenings, but you may set up another process if you prefer.