Access to the case file, known in U.S. administrative practice as the administrative record, is one of the key questions in sanctions practice. The answer determines whether a designated party can build a focused legal position or must work blind, with only the agency’s general formulations to react to. The practical answer is short: the OFAC administrative record becomes available to a designated party only within a federal court proceeding. All other paths – administrative request, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, 5 U.S.C. § 552), counsel’s correspondence with the agency – yield either a very limited result or no result at all.

Pre-Litigation Access: The Limits of the Administrative Stage

At the administrative stage, before a lawsuit is filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (D.D.C.), the OFAC administrative record is unavailable to the designated party in any meaningful form. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announces a designation by updating the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List, typically accompanied by a press release; a related notice is also published in the Federal Register, often with some delay. The press release may briefly reference the general grounds for designation: a connection to a sanctioned sector of the economy, affiliation with another SDN, or involvement in specific transactions. A critical nuance: neither the press release nor the Federal Register notice contains anything close to a detailed evidentiary basis for the decision.

When an administrative delisting petition is filed, OFAC may send the petitioner clarifying questions or a request for supplemental information. That, however, is a tool for the agency to extract information from the petitioner, not a mechanism for disclosure to the petitioner. OFAC’s response on the petition typically consists of a generic statement. The negative response, for instance, may state that the materials submitted are insufficient to warrant reconsideration. The specific documents underlying the conclusion of a designation, the intelligence-derived sources, the inter-agency correspondence — all of this remains outside what the petitioner sees.

The situation with asset freezes looks much the same. Clients learn that their assets have been blocked through a brief notification from the bank that froze them. The notification contains no details about the reasons for the freeze. Attempts to obtain more information from the bank typically yield no result either. The bank freezes the funds under its internal compliance policies, which it is under no obligation to disclose.

As a result, building a legal position at this stage proceeds through reconstruction: which factual assertions OFAC apparently treats as established, which sources it likely relied on, which legal characterizations it applies. This method works for a first-round petition but does not provide the foundation for targeted challenges.

Why the Freedom of Information Act Does Not Solve the Problem

A FOIA request seems like a logical next step, but applied to sanctions files its effectiveness is severely limited.

OFAC routinely applies the following exemptions to sanctions materials (FOIA, 5 U.S.C. § 552):

• (b)(1) – information classified in the interest of national security;
• (b)(3) – information protected by specific statutes, including materials shared by foreign governments;
• (b)(5) – internal deliberative inter-agency communications;
• (b)(7) – law enforcement records.

In practice, this means that the document set obtained through FOIA is either fully redacted (pages of solid black bars) or limited to publicly available correspondence and standard forms. FOIA processing times at OFAC run into months, often years on complex requests. Administrative appeals of redactions rarely yield meaningful results. FOIA is therefore not a working mechanism for obtaining the OFAC administrative record in a sanctions dispute.

How APA Litigation Compels Disclosure of the Record

The picture changes fundamentally once a lawsuit against OFAC is filed under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Under the standard of judicial review on the administrative record (5 U.S.C. § 706), a court evaluates the agency’s decision based on the body of documents the agency relied on in making it. This means OFAC must file the full administrative record with the court – that is, compile and lodge all materials that formed the basis for the challenged decision.

After suit is filed, OFAC typically sends the court a notice of filing of administrative record within 60 to 90 days, accompanied by an index of documents. The unclassified portion is provided to the plaintiff and counsel. Classified portions are submitted to the judge ex parte and in camera (i.e., reviewed by the judge separately, without the plaintiff or counsel present). In D.D.C. practice, the court conducts an independent review of the classification justifications and, in some cases, may require the agency to prepare unclassified summaries for production to the plaintiff.

The volume and substance of what is disclosed depend on the nature of the case, but in most sanctions disputes the unclassified portion of the record substantially exceeds anything the petitioner has previously seen: specific sources become visible, the dates of the materials, the chains of agency reasoning, references to reports, correspondence, and open sources.

What the Unclassified Portion of the OFAC Administrative Record Contains

The unclassified portion of the OFAC administrative record in a typical sanctions dispute generally includes:

• the designation memorandum setting out the factual grounds for inclusion;
• open-source materials gathered by the agency: articles, corporate registries, databases;
• financial and corporate information obtained from banking and regulatory sources;
• Treasury internal correspondence and decision documents related to the case;
• an index of classified materials with descriptions of their nature.

It is precisely this body of materials that reveals how OFAC characterized specific facts: which transactions it treated as evidence of control, which connections it deemed sufficient to apply the 50 percent rule, which sources it relied on to establish facts not supported by official corporate documentation.

Practical Value of Reviewing the Record

Analysis of the OFAC administrative record often becomes the turning point in a sanctions dispute. The key conclusions a petitioner and counsel draw from the materials:

• what specific evidence underlies the decision and how strong it actually is;
• which materials are stale or predate the events in dispute;
• which conclusions rest on secondary or open sources of questionable quality;
• which evidence submitted by the petitioner went unaddressed by the agency;
• which procedural steps by OFAC are vulnerable to challenge under the arbitrary-and-capricious standard.

These findings make it possible to strengthen the position in the pending proceeding and to prepare a motion for summary judgment identifying specific defects in the administrative record and seeking remand to OFAC for reconsideration.

Often the very disclosure of the OFAC administrative record shifts the agency’s posture: confronted with the materials viewed from the outside, with counsel’s reaction to them, and with the resulting legal exposure, OFAC more frequently agrees to reconsider.

Strategic Conclusion

In sanctions practice, an APA suit against OFAC performs two functions. The first is the judicial challenge to the OFAC decision itself. The second, no less important – obtaining the OFAC administrative record needed to build a defense. The two functions reinforce each other: a serious lawsuit opens access to the record, and access to the record makes the lawsuit substantively credible.

For parties on the SDN List or facing a denial of an OFAC specific license, the implication is direct: the administrative path alone does not exhaust the real options. Filing suit, paired with a professionally prepared administrative petition, opens access to materials without which an effective defense is, in practice, impossible.