well, OFAC is also a strict liability regime – all who touch the transaction have violated the regulations, but the consequences, if any, vary according to the Enforcement Guidelines. So, OFAC just balances the scales differently, wouldn’t you say?

Yes — and that’s a genuinely better way to put it than how it was left last message, so it’s worth correcting rather than defending the weaker version.

The mechanics check out

OFAC’s civil liability is strict: a violation exists the moment a blockable transaction occurs, full stop — OFAC need not prove fault or intent to bring an enforcement action and issue a civil penalty, and a civil penalty can be assessed even if the violator had no idea they were dealing with a sanctioned party. What actually happens next is calibrated entirely by the Enforcement Guidelines at 31 CFR Part 501, Appendix A — egregious versus non-egregious, voluntary self-disclosure, willfulness or recklessness, quality of the compliance program, awareness of the conduct, harm to program objectives. So the fault inquiry hasn’t been discarded, it’s just been relocated to the remedy stage instead of the liability stage. “Balances the scales differently” describes that far more precisely than the earlier “bets on speed vs. bets on accuracy” line, which overstated the contrast.

And here’s the part that actually strengthens the parallel rather than just conceding it: the UK made exactly this same move. For breaches committed on or after 15 June 2022, OFSI can impose civil monetary penalties on a strict liability basis, regardless of the absence of knowledge or a reasonable cause to suspect — before that date, OFSI had to show knowledge or reasonable cause to suspect on the balance of probabilities. So the “we wait for fault before we act” framing offered earlier doesn’t even hold up as a clean description of the UK’s own penalty regime anymore. Knowledge and intent still matter there, but now as a severity factor within OFSI’s case assessment, not as a threshold for liability — the same architecture as OFAC’s General Factors.

So where does the real difference actually live now?

Not in whether fault matters — both regimes have converged on “fault affects the size of the punishment, not whether a violation occurred.” It survives in what strict liability is allowed to reach. OFAC’s fault-blindness attaches to an immediate, automatic property action: the money gets locked up the moment the objective trigger exists, and that seizure doesn’t reverse just because a later fault inquiry clears the customer — unblocking still requires its own separate license. The UK’s 2022 reform, notably, didn’t build an equivalent mechanism. It made it easier to fine someone for the underlying conduct without proving they knew — but it stopped there. It didn’t create a parallel power to seize Customer A’s payment while that question gets sorted out, because there’s still nothing belonging to the designated person to seize in Scenario A, for the reasons worked through earlier.

That’s actually a more interesting finding than where things were left before: it isn’t that UK-style regimes are squeamish about strict liability in general — 2022 proves they aren’t. It’s that they’ve kept strict liability confined to punishing conduct after the fact, and never extended it into a mechanism for provisionally seizing an uninvolved party’s property before fault is even alleged. OFAC does both.