AUO screens names and identifiers against Australian watchlists: the DFAT consolidated sanctions list and the ASIC banned and disqualified persons and organisations registers. How AUO reports the result is deliberate, and it matters for compliance.

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Verdicts are possible-match, never “cleared”

Screening never returns pass, fail, or cleared. It returns one of:
VerdictMeaning
reviewA possible match was found at or above the score threshold. A human should review it.
no_matchNo match was found in the checked registers as of the checked date.
unavailableA register could not be read. This is never reported as a clean no_match.
“No match found as of ” is not a clearance. It means AUO did not find a match in the registers it checked, at the moment it checked. Treat a no_match as a data point, not a decision.
A name plus date-of-birth or place-of-birth hit is always review. A DOB match raises confidence but a missing or non-matching DOB never excludes a candidate, because the DFAT date-of-birth field is multi-value and cannot be reliably parsed. A name hit without a DOB match still warrants review.

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Always know which register produced a hit

Every screen response breaks the verdict down by underlying register, so you can see exactly what matched: 
"screening": {
  "dfat_sanctions": { "status": "no_match", "checked_as_of": "2026-07-02T03:22:16Z" },
  "asic_banned_org": { "status": "no_match", "checked_as_of": "2026-07-02T03:22:16Z" },
  "asic_banned_person": { "status": "not_applicable", "note": "entity, not natural person" },
  "external_administration": { "status": "none_active", "source": "ASIC_published_notices" }
}
The overall verdict is review if any source is review, unavailable if any source is unavailable, otherwise no_match. A read failure fails safe to unavailable, so an outage can never look like a clean result.

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Screening a trust screens the trustee

For a trust, AUO screens the resolved corporate trustee, not the trust, because that is where liability sits.

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The disclaimer is always present

Every screen response includes a disclaimer stating that no match found is not a clearance and that possible matches require human review. It is part of the contract, not boilerplate you can ignore.

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Screen endpoint

The request and response reference for POST /screen.

Honest boundaries

Where screening fits in the wider picture of what AUO covers.