By Colleen Rothe

How would you like to have to show evidence of tattoos in order to secure a car loan? That’s exactly what happened to a Maryland man recently. He went in to buy a Toyota and during the credit check his name popped up as a suspected terrorist. He was asked to be ‘checked for tattoos’ to prove he wasn’t the person on the list.

But this poor consumer is not alone. More and more Americans are finding daily interruptions in their consumer transactions come to a grinding halt because they have a name similar to or the same as someone on the U.S. Treasury Department’s watch-list of suspected terrorists and drug dealers.

These consumers are not simply those with birth names with middle-eastern or other Muslim heritage surnames either. A former U.S. Naval officer and second-generation combat veteran was locked out of his PayPal account because his name ended up on the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which compiles the list of suspected terrorists and drug dealers, also known as the Specially Designated Nationals List.

But when the veteran tried to get his name cleared he got the proverbial government run around. The same circular path was journeyed by the Maryland Toyota buyer, who initially was sent to the various credit-reporting agencies along with the FBI, according to documents released to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area this week. It was the FBI that finally sent him to the Treasury Department.

This is no trivial list either, in searching my maiden and married names I came upon the names of Watab Ibrahim Al-Hassan, half-brother of the now deceased Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Also, I found Borislav Milosevic, yes, Slobadan’s brother. Because as the list was scanned for the name ‘Rothe’ it came upon every criminal’s brother and half brother. Hence, the reason a poor 18-year-old American Native found he was refused a credit card account for his technology start-up business, because his name was similar to that of a Libyan official on the SDN-List.

Federal law requires that American businesses refrain from conducting transactions with anyone on this watch list. Businesses ignoring this statute can face stiff penalties. If your name is similar to a name on the OFAC’s list, you could potentially have a credit bureau flag, which is why the misguided car dealership sent their tattoo-less customer to the likes of Experian and Equifax.

But despite the rising number of Americans that are being denied car or home loans, rental agreements, and even financing for a treadmill, because their name is erroneously associated with a terrorist or drug cartel official, the OFAC defends the necessity of its list.

“OFAC’s list of designated individuals and entities is a powerful tool that disrupts financial flows to terrorists, narcotics traffickers and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction,” Treasury spokesman John Rankin said in an interview with the Washington Post. “This vigilance has an important deterrent effect and shines a light on illicit conduct.”

Effective tool or not – that remains to be seen, much as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the problem according to the LCCR is that there is no easy process to correct errors, and that the Treasury Department is hampering more consumers ability to transact freely than it reports and/or documents.

Rankin contends that they address everyone’s concerns seriously and they have a hotline set up to resolve issues immediately. He urges law-abiding citizens whose names and identities have been confused with names on the watch list to call 1-800-540-6322.

In our post-9/11 world, getting the OFAC-list law changed or revoked is probably fairly difficult; but, pressuring our American leaders to create a better process for those caught in the Global War on Terrorism or the War on Drugs’ crossfire should be done. No word yet if the Lawyers Committee, a group started in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy, will lead such a charge.

In the meantime, before you apply for that jumbo mortgage, you might want to see if your name is on the list, or if a name that could be confused with yours appears. Check out the SDN List at http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/index.shtml.