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Enhanced Due Diligence

Compliance systems can free up employee time, enabling a company to focus on the more pertinent issue of enhanced due diligence. Employee training and intelligence are paramount when conducting the enhanced due diligence upon a failed verification or a list match. PA Compliance has compiled resources on the World Wide Web that can be very useful when researching a company or an individual.

Google also has many options for due diligence, including a very up-to-date news articles listed by country, as well as language translation tools. Here are some of the google options to consider when conducting due diligence:

1. Images can be useful when the entity's name does not bring up sources.
2. News:
   1. 4500 news sources updated every few minutes
   2. Stories are kept for 30 days, and are able to be sorted by date
   3. The bottom of the page lists international versions of the news for a country-focused new search
3. Language Tools allow you to translate foreign companies with foreign language documents. For instance, to copy text of a Spanish document and click "Spanish to English" and will roughly translate.
4. Google by Country allows you to visit the google site for that particular country in order to narrow the search.
5. Click on word cashed beside the search result in order to get the original article if it requires you to buy it

Certain files cannot be accessed by a typical World Wide Web search. In this case, it is possible to search the "invisible web" for certain databases of information. One such site is www.searchsystems.net, which offers about 23,000 free search engines worldwide. Simply enter the entity's name.

The "historical web" is also a great source of information that was at one time on the web, but has since been pulled. For instance, if you attempt to access a customer's website and the page cannot be displayed, the following site could prove useful. Go to www.archive.org, a non-profit that takes snapshots of the internet all the way back to May 1996. Not only can you retrieve every homepage version, but it is a useful means of determining how long the company has been in business.

Tips when using the web:

• To verify the validity of a website, right click on the page to view the source
• Note that the internet can only grab the text associated with the image
• Be creative with search tools, i.e.: enter the phone number of the business to verify it is a match with the business
• To learn about the entity and who they are doing business with use THE LINK TEST. Type in "link:www.website.com". This will bring up any website that links to their site.