Generating productive alerts requires focusing screening systems on relevant, high-quality data to minimize false positives. The Wolfsberg Group guidance supports this by recommending two core practices. First, financial institutions should consider excluding certain low-risk parties (e.g., specific government entities, internal accounts) from screening to concentrate resources on higher-risk areas. Second, maintaining data hygiene is crucial. This involves regularly reviewing and removing data that is no longer relevant for risk assessment, such as a former address or a closed account, from the screening population. Both principles help ensure that the alerts generated are more meaningful and warrant investigation, thereby improving the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the sanctions screening program.

A. The guidance promotes automated, efficient, and comprehensive screening; relying on manual processes and narrowly limiting screening by jurisdiction runs counter to these principles.

C. A "good guy" list is specifically used to suppress known common false positives, not to avoid suppressing them, thereby increasing alert productivity.

D. Reducing the threshold settings from an optimal level would increase the volume of alerts, including false positives, which is the opposite of creating more productive alerts.

1. The Wolfsberg Group. (2019). Guidance on Sanctions Screening. Page 11, Section 4.3, "Data". This section explicitly supports both correct answers:

For option B: "FIs should consider what data is relevant for screening and what data may be excluded (e.g. internal or suspense accounts, or certain types of government entities)."

For option E: "FIs should also consider whether certain data should be removed from screening on an ongoing basis once it is no longer relevant (e.g. a former address)."

2. The Wolfsberg Group. (2019). Guidance on Sanctions Screening. Page 12, Section 4.4, "Tuning". This section refutes options C and D:

For option C: "FIs may also use suppression lists (sometimes referred to as “good guy” lists) to automatically discount alerts against names that have been previously investigated and discounted as false positives."

For option D: The section discusses the importance of setting an "appropriate threshold" to balance effectiveness and efficiency, implying that moving away from an optimal level would be detrimental.