Tracking Trade Bad Guys

Dec. 21, 2004

Even more important after Sept. 11, software and management services offer international traders ways to screen customers.

John McClenahen

You may have never heard of the U.S. denied parties list, which, contrary to what the name suggests, has nothing to do with being banned from swanky social events. However, if trade is part of your company's strategic game, and you're an American CEO who doesn't want to serve jail time, you can't afford to ignore who's on -- and who is not on -- the list. The list -- actually it's more than half a dozen lists -- consists of people and companies that the U.S. Commerce Department, Treasury Department and State Department don't want you doing business with. The objects of their non-affection are baddies such as terrorists, narcotics smugglers and foreign firms that might do nasty things with nuclear material. Needless to say, these lists have taken on additional significance since last year's Sept. 11 attacks. Manufacturers and other U.S. companies confront a major challenge in keeping current with the lists. The federal agencies that compile them can update the lists as often as three times a day, notes Darren Maynard, COO of NextLinx Corp., a Rockville, Md.-based provider of software solutions for international trade management. "We literally have staff checking the U.S. lists three times a day to make sure our tables are current and pushing those changes out to our customers," Maynard says. NextLinx' customers include Cisco Systems Inc., Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc. and 3Com Corp. High-tech firms, automakers, chemical producers, pharmaceutical companies, apparel makers and makers of consumer-packaged goods are among the manufacturers contacting his company these days and asking about customer screening, says Gregory E. Stock, vice president for marketing at Vastera Inc., a Dulles, Va., company that produces trade-related software and manages trade operations for such companies as Ford Motor Co., Dell Computer Corp., Microsoft Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc. and Ingersoll-Rand Co. "The amount of time it takes to sell [our management solutions] has gone down . . . because companies are coming in and saying, 'I need to do this now,'" Stock relates. "We do a lot more than just that screening piece, but right now that's the thing that seems to have companies really wanting to talk to us." Demand for Vastera's and NextLinx's technologies and services seems destined to increase. In addition to the U.S. lists, the United Nations has a restricted list, and the Europeans are assembling one. "We have to get those lists, bring them together into a single technology, and make it very easy for [manufacturers] to just take their orders and every second, every minute, every hour bounce them against the list to make sure they are not sending their goods to the wrong person," says Stock.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.